The Gods of Atheism

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Continued from the front flap |
VINCENT P. MICELI, S.J., was born of Italian
immigrants in New York City in 1915, the 9th
of 10 children. While attending Cathedral
High School in that same city, and maintaining
a 95.5 average, he worked six days a week from

3 to 10 p.m. delivering books.

In 1936 he entered the Society of Jesus, and in
1942 received his bachelor’s degree from Spring
Hill College. Ordained in 1949, Father Miceli
received his S.T.L. from St. Louis University
in 1950 and his Ph.D. from Fordham in 1961.
His doctoral dissertation was on the French

Catholic existentialist, Gabriel Marcel.

At present, Father Miceli is Visiting Professor
of Philosophy at Rome’s Gregorian University.
Before that he taught at Loyola University in
New Orleans, where he became something of a
local television celebrity with his program on
Loyola’s Channel 4. Among the subjects he
covered on the air were “Problems of Dissent,”
“Adventures in Atheism,’ and “Experiments

in Existentialism.”

Vincent Miceli’s one previous book was Gabriel
Marcel’s Philosophy of Communion, which
Frederick Wilhelmsen in National Review
called “stunning” and “a triumph.” Father
Miceli has had articles published in Thought,
The New Scholasticism, National Review, The

Interracial Review, Triumph, and Social Digest.

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The Gods of Atheism

by VINCENT P. MICELI, SJ.

When He sculptured the Ten Commandments
in stone God did not write: “Thou shalt not
be an atheist.” Instead, He commanded: “Thou
shalt not have strange gods before Me.” Why?
Because man is incurably God-centered. He
cannot exist without a God, and if he rejects the
true God, he will invariably create his own

false god.

Fr. Vincent Miceli breaks new ground with his
analyses of seventeen thinkers from Feuerbach
to today’s “death of God” school. He demon-
strates how they became atheists or, remaining
believers, how they were used as bridges to
modern atheism. In his survey of atheism today,

the author discovers surprising contributors.

This work is divided into four parts, each em-
phasizing a pull in man’s nature which leads
him to atheism: “Atheism as an Adventure
of the Mind”; Atheism as a Passion of the
Heart”; “Atheism as Myths of the Imagina-
tion”; and “Atheism as the Victimization of
God by Man.” Within these parts, two of the
most important chapters treat of Marx and his
worship of the classless society, and Comte with

his exaltation of social humanity as God.

This major work, anchored in Catholic ortho-

doxy, will enrich theists regardless of their
faith — and provoke others to reassess the

source of their doubt.

Continued on the back flap

VINCENT P. MICELI, S.J.

OF
ATHEISM

forint

ARLINGTON HOUSE New Rochélle, N.Y.

SECOND PRINTING OCTOBER 1971

Copyright © 1971 by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York. All rights
reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permis-
sion from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in
connection with a review.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-115349
ISBN 0-87000-099-3

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI

BY THE GOODNESS OF GOD

PRINCE OF PASTORS IN THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH
INFALLIBLE TEACHER OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
COURAGEOUS PROTECTOR OF HUMAN LIFE
WITH AFFECTION AND ADMIRATION

ON THE OCCASION OF

THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF

HIS ORDINATION TO THE HOLY PRIESTHOOD

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART I

Gods as Adventures of the Mind

I. Mystery of Atheism

II. Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God

Il. Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman

Iv. Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God

V. Comte: Social Humanity as God

Part II Gods as Passions of the Heart

Vi. ‘Camus: The God of Absurdity

VII. Sarte: The Changing of His Gods

VII. Heidegger: Waiting for the New God

Ix. Merleau-Ponty: Man, the God of Meaning
and Liberty

X. Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum

Part III Gods as Myths of the Modern Mentality

XI. Bultmann: The Demythologized God

XI. Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity

XIII. Robinson: The Depersonalized God

XIV. Cox: The Delphic God of the Secular City

Part IV Gods as Victims of Man

XV. Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer

XVI. Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God

XVII. Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God

XVII. Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity

XIX. The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

vii

20
42
92

142

187
216
247

276
308

329
348
363
373

385
398
414
428
446

478
487

Acknowledgment

The research for this study on contemporary atheism began
in the Spring of 1967 when WWL-TV, channel 4 of Loyola Uni-
versity of New Orleans, invited the author, then associate
professor of philosophy at the university, to give a series of
lectures on this subject as a part of its program in the public
interest entitled: At The College Level. Ten half-hour lectures
were taped and shown under the title of Adventures In Athe-
ism. Audience response was good and so the city’s educational
channel WYES replayed the tapes at another time for the be-
nefit of those who might have missed them. I am glad to render
thanks to WWL-TV for goading me into this work.

At the end of that same academic year Loyola University
presented me with a year’s leave of absence and a grant of
$3,300 to go to Europe and expand the lectures into a book-size
study. I am deeply indebted to Loyola University for its initial
interest and financial assistance towards the creation of the
embryonic stages of this book.

After a year in Paris, where Part. I of the book was re-
searched, I was given another year’s leave of.absence, this time
at Rome, but without a renewal of the grant, the university’s
fund for research grants having been discontinued. It was at
this time of crisis that the Rev. Martin V. Jarreau, S. J., Vice-
President of the University for Community Relations, per-
suaded the members of the Greater New Orleans Italian
Cultural Society to finance the book to its completion. It was
due to the sustaining vision and generosity of Fr. Jarreau, the
Italian Cultural Society—under the leadership of Dr. Nicholas
Accardo and Attorney Peter Compagno—along with many
other benefactors, too numerous to mention here, that the pe-
riod of gestation for this book was successfully completed. They
deserve the greatest credit and my deepest thanks for insuring
the book’s development through its four parts to its birth in
publication.

ix

With respect to the book’s scholarly and spiritual formation,
I would like to express my gratitude to some prominent schol-
ars who cordially received me into their homes or studies and
shared with me the wisdom of their reflections. Among such
savants I wish to thank the Very Rev. Pedro Arrupe, General of
the Society of Jesus, the Rev. Andrew Varga, S. J., Gabriel Mar-
cel, Dr. E. L. Mascall, Jean Cardinal Daniélou, S. J., Sir Arnold
Lunn, Mr. Garth Lean, Esq., Dr. Balduin Schwarz, Dr. and Mrs.
Goetz Briefs, the Rev. Martin D’Arcy, S. J., Dr. John Crosby, Dr.
Josef Seifert, Dr. Damian Fedoryka, the Rev. Anthony C. O’-
Flynn, S. J., the Rev. Alfred J. Jolson, S. J. and the Rev. Vincenzo
Miano, S. D. B., Secretary of the Vatican Secretariat for Non-
Believers.

To two extraordinary scholars and friends—the Rev. Joseph
F. Costanzo, S. J., Professor of Historical Jurisprudence and the
Rev. Herbert A. Musurillo, S. J., Chairman of the Graduate De-
partment of Classical Studies, both of Fordham University—I
would like to pay a special tribute of gratitude. They studied the
entire manuscript and raised it to a form of greater cogency by
their sagacious criticisms. The scholars whom I have thanked
here are, however, in no way responsible for the book’s limita-
tions.

Finally, I offer the tribute of cordial thanks to His Eminence
John Cardinal Wright for his kindness in honoring this work
with a preface of exceptional insight. An international teacher-
witness and successor of the Apostles working in Rome, he is
directly engaged in striving to cure modern society of its fasci-
nation for godless humanism. His mission is of the highest
importance, for it puts full emphasis in the Christ-like training
of young men destined for the priesthood, leaders destined to
radiate the Veritas that liberates and the Caritas that elevates
the community of men into the community of saints.

Preface

Father Vincent Miceli is the most recent of a valiant company
within the Society of Jesus who clearly perceive that God is the heart
of the matter no matter what aspect of reality or of illusion we seek
to get straight. The question of God’s existence runs, mercury-like,
through the discussion and evaluation of all the other questions which
stimulate or depress the minds of men.

Today, smack in the middle of the age of scientism, technology and
the myth of progress, there is not a problem which can be put in
perspective or given the hope of enduring resolution except in terms
of our answer to the basic question posed briefly but definitely in the
phrase of the scholastics: Utrum Deus sit? `

Ultimately, the answer to that question and to the built-in question
which follows from it—i.e., What kind of a God is God, if He exists?
—is the beginning of the answer to any other questions worth asking.
The master knots of human fate, the mysteries of life and death, the
contradictions of good and evil, the history of nations and the destinies
of persons, these, when all is said and done, have eternal significance
or none at all according as we answer this first and basic question.

Whatever the merits of new methodologies in catechetics, none of
these can compete with the quality of clarity, finality and basic impor-
tance which characterized the opening question of the very first cate-
chism that introduced us, in something like formal terms, to the faith:
What is God?

One need not be reminded that competent contemporary theolo-
gians and philosophers, who are exploring the multiple implications
of this so fundamental question, have been forced to a vocabulary
infinitely more complicated than that of the dreadful penny cate-
chism. Indeed, the God Who was once understood, however dimly, as
Pure Act, Sheer Intelligence, Untrammeled Truth and Love, has al-
most been lost in the rhetoric and the erudition of those who have
sought to clarify by expanding the primitive, simple answers to the
perennial, inescapable questions: What is God? What are His claims
upon us? What is His relevance to us? What part do we play in any
providence, plan, purpose.or design He (if He exists) may have? More-
over, if He does not exist, to whom or to what else shall we turn?

I have mentioned that Father Miceli belongs to that perhaps small

xi

but God-sent group of Jesuits who have concentrated, with special and
insistent attention, on these questions as their preoccupation in the
midst of the riddles of the hour. It would be unjust and unfactual to
pretend that these Jesuits are the only religious or other theologians
concerned with the “problem of God” and the dialogue concerning
whatever gods may be; it would, in fact, be depressing if such were the
case. But those who love the Jesuit tradition rejoice in the work of
those who see this as tke central issue in our culture and our crises.
One such is the incomparable Father Henri de Lubac, who brings such
sensitivity, such gifts of intellect and love to the humanistic dialogue
concerning the existence and nature of God. Another was our own
Father John Courtney Murray, whom one often thinks God intended
to be a great theologian rather than, as the pressures of the times
turned him out to be, a somewhat specialized political philosopher.
Father Murray’s lectures at Yale on the existence and nature of God
are the only evidence I need to bring in support of my argument in this
regard.

Father Vincent Miceli is a third in this special company of contem-
porary Jesuits. His contribution is an analysis of the modern alterna-
tives to God, the gods of present-day atheism, which those who answer
the first question of the penny catechism in a negative fashion, how-
ever expensive their best sellers, are obliged sooner or later to wor-
ship.

The logical and psychological compulsion to choose some strange
god, if the God of Abraham and of Jesus Christ be rejected, rests on
needs deep in human nature. Man is a rational animal, as the Greeks
taught us. He is also, it is pleasant to remember, a laughing animal.
He is a social animal, an economic animal, a political animal and all
the other kinds of animal that a score of anthropologies have proven
him to be. But underneath it all and overriding all else, he is a mystical
animal. He either prays or pouts; he either adores or anguishes. In
moments of cultural crises, like our own, he may do all of these in
varying proportions. But he remains unalterably God-centered. He
cannot exist without a God, and if he rejects the true God he will
invariably, instinctively, even perversely create his own false god.

Father Vincent Miceli brings unusual qualifications to his analysis
of the gods of atheism and his consequent oblique defense of the God
of our fathers. He is the son of a family that honored and cooperated
with the God of Life. His vocation to the priesthood in the Society of
Jesus was and remains a vocation to serve the God of Truth. His pas-
sion to share the truth unto the salvation óf others, humble and ex-
alted alike, identifies him as the servant of the God of Love. His
academic background prepares him to bear his intellectual and apos-

Introduction

Atheists, like saints, are made not born. It is not easy to be-
come a saint. The road to the summit of moral transfiguration
is steep and treacherous. Left to himself, man cannot manage
the climb; his sin-weakened nature is in absolute need of divine
grace. Thus, God, Who is holiness Himself, alone can develop
sanctity in man. But man, endowed with intelligence and free-
dom, must, of course, cooperate in his own sanctification. Now
the perfect human formula for sainthood is found in Mary’s
response to God: “Behold, the servant of the Lord. Be it done
unto me according to Thy word.” Saints are, therefore, formed
in the image of God’s Word whose “food was to do the Will of
Him Who sent me.”

Paradoxically, it is not easy to be an atheist either. It is terri-
fying to attempt escape from the Divine Lover. The road leads
down to violent serfdom. Here, however, unlike the quest for
sanctity, the drive for atheism is a one-sided affair, demanded
by man, contested by God. No one becomes an atheist unknow-
ingly or unwillingly. Even so-called “born atheists” indoc-
trinated from childhood onward in the schools of Organized
Atheism eventually, as adults, must make a decision for or
against God. For that matter, the same is true of Christians
drilled in the fundamentals of their faith as children. After all,
how does one teach minors? According to their capacity, of
course. Thus, early indoctrination in itself is a perfectly valid
method for instructing minors in the faith of their fathers. The
method is vitiated when employed in indoctrinating children,
or adults for that matter, in known falsity or moral evil. When,
however, minors become intellectual adults, indoctrination
should cease. Faith bolstered by reason should be taught and
practiced. The science of theology is taught to the intellectually
advanced. Thus, in the adult the responsibility for belief calls
for his ratification of his childhood faith by a decision for God
and His revelation. St. Peter, the Apostles, the learned Fathers

xiv

and Doctors of the Church exhorted Christians of all walks of
life to be always ready to present any inquirer with reasonable
answers for the faith that ruled their minds and hearts.

For their part, atheists are not backward in giving reason to
their unbelief. And they do so with philosophic profoundity and
literary virtuosity, as this study aims at demonstrating. Pascal
recognized what Ronald Knox might have called “the enthusi-
asm,” that is, the blazing zeal in the religion of humanistic
atheism. His immortal statement on the subject declares:
“Atheism is an indication of spiritual vigor but only to a certain
degree.”! We hope to show that atheism’s vigor arises from its
heroic will to create mythical gods in place of the true God. We
hope to prove that its feebleness is demonstrated by its utter
inability to cure the contradictory crisis it creates between man
whom it would advance in freedom and its own New God whom
it cannot restrain from devouring mankind.

Thus, this study will maintain that no atheist chooses merely
to deny God. For the atheist’s spiritual posture against God is
at the same time his posture in preference for some other Being
above God. As he dismisses the true God he is welcoming his
New God. Why must this be so? Because every personal com-
mitment of man presupposes, deep in the metaphysical core of
his being, a hunger for being as truth and goodness. Man is
intrinsically burdened with an incurable hunger for transcen-
dence. If being abhors a vacuum, the vacuum it most violently
shrinks from is the total absence of Infinite Being. And history
demonstrates that man is inconsolable without the True God.
Dostoyevsky who experienced this abhorrence in atheist
Russia has one of his characters in The Devils or The Possessed
express it thus: “If a man were to be deprived of the infinitely
great, he would refuse to go on living and die of despair. The
infinite and the immeasurable is as necessary to man as the
little planet which he inhabits . . . My friends, God is necessary
to me if only because he is the only being whom one can love
eternally.”?

We have said that it is terrifying to attempt to live without
God. Kirilov, one of the many atheists in The Devils testifies to

1. Blaise Pascal, Penseés, ed. Brunschvicg, III, p. 431.
2. Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils or The Possessed (London: Penguin), pp.
655-656.

XV

this truth. “To realize that there is no God and not to realize at
the same instant that you have become God yourself—is an
absurdity, for else you would certainly kill yourself. I cannot
understand how an atheist could know that there is no God and
not kill himself at once!” Why then are so many atheists alive
and flourishing? Because, according to Kirilov, they have ac-
cepted the role of being their own gods. “For three years I have
been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I’ve found
it: the attribute of my divinity is—Self-Will! That’s all I can do
to prove in the main point my defiance and my new terrible
freedom. For it is very terrible. I am killing myself to show my
defiance and my new terrible freedom.”*

Against the background of this truth, how can we explain the
rapid advance of open and camouflaged atheism in our times?
How can we evaluate Nicholas Hartmann’s call for a “postula-
tory atheism” which teaches that God not only does not exist,
but also that He ought not to exist? In studying some of the
great intellectual atheists of our times, we will try to show that
such atheists continued to exist and work laboriously, even
though they deliberately denied the existence of God, because
they had created for themselves a new, attractive god of their
own. And they had dedicated themselves and their work to this
new Transcendent Being. Far from despairing over the loss of
the rejected God, these learned giants, with high hubris, threw
themselves into the thrilling eschatological divertissement of
planning and directing the temporal destiny of man in the ser-
vice of their New God.

Eric Voegelin carefully concluded, after studying profoundly
the new Gnostic gods.espoused by our modern atheists, as fol-
lows: “The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche
revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he an-
nounced that God was dead and that He had been murdered.
This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by men who sac-
rifice God to civilization. The more fervently all human ener-
gies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through
world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who en-
gage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit.
And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and
society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause

3. Ibid, pp. 614-615.

xvi

of its decline.”4 Humanistic atheism.in the modern form of the
idolatrous adoration of the new Gnostic gods is destroying the
society of man.

The aim of this work is to indicate that the great sin of con-
temporary atheism is that it consists, through a sustained act
of Supreme Self-Will, in a total preoccupation with the human.
This atheism induces man to fall down before himself in nar-
cissistic adoration and love. In one form or another, the systems
of thought expounded in this work call man to a religious alle-
giance solely to Man-God. They reject the one True God and the
God-Man whom He sent to divinize man in a valid way. “Not
Thy Will but My or Our Human Will be done,” is their sole
creed, dedication and enterprise.

Pascal, recording the unutterable religious experience he
had in an encounter with the true God on the night of Novem-
ber 23, 1654, indicates the only sure road back from the dreadful
social ditch into which advancing atheism has tripped man. He
wrote: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the
philosophers and scholars. God of Jesus Christ. God of Jesus
Christ. My God and Your God ... He alone can be found by the
ways taught in the Gospels . . . He alone can be kept by the ways
taught in the Gospels. Sweet and total submission to Jesus
Christ . . .”5

In this work we are not inspired with a spirit of animus. We
are inspired with the spirit of Christian criticism of these
atheistic philosophies that have brought and are still inflicting
on man great tragedy. It must be remembered throughout this
study that the scholars treated, almost to a man, were origi-
nally Christians who knew the ways and the message of the
Gospels well. Early in their lives they knew Jesus Christ as the
Son of God. Moreover, they even loved and lived the ways and
message of the Gospels for some part of their lives. Why they
went away from God and broke with Christ as His Divine Son
they have recorded in many of their works with the hope of
persuading others to follow their paths. From the testimony of
their lives as atheists, from history’s witness of the evil effects
of their systems of thought and from long reflective research

4. Eric Voegelin, Tke New Science Of Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952), p. 131.
5. Blaise Pascal, Pensés (London: Penguin), pp. 309-310. Italics in original.

xvii

we have come to the conclusion that theirs are dangerously
misleading and even at times degrading views that sap the
spiritual substance of man. That is why we have undertaken to
identify, analyze and evaluate their religious philosophies of
life. It is hoped that this study may lead readers to reject the
paths that run to the temples of the strange Gnostic Gods of
humanistic atheism. For in these temples the masses are
trapped in the millenium of temporality. On the positive side,
it is hoped that those groping for the true God may be helped
to find Him and hold Him where he can only be found and held
—in Jesus Christ, the way, the truth and the life, in the sweet
and total submission to the God-Man.

V.P.M.

Rome

Part One

Gods as Adventures of the Mind

With the blade of his criticism, his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, the

executioner, beheaded belief in God. God, therefore, became now noth-
ing but fiction.

Werke IX

Heinrich Heine

The scene is hell. Friedrich Engels in his epic poem depicts Danton,
Voltaire and Hegel welcoming Satan, just back from a fact-finding
tour to earth where he had also been training freethinkers and athe-
ists in their campaign to transform men into “Godless selfgods.” Hegel
is explaining what his strategy in this battle was:
“And Hegel, whose mouth until this moment grimness locked,
Suddenly rose up giant high and spoke:
‘I consecrated all my life to Science,
Preached atheism with my whole strength:
I placed Self-Consciousness upon her throne,
Convinced I had already conquered God.’”
Friedrich Engels
Quoted by Georg Siegmund
in God On Trial

CHAPTER I

|
J
|

4
Da
DA
@

Mystery of Atheism

ATHEISM, THE THEME OF THIS STUDY, HAS FROM THE
dawn of creation, been the great temptation for intelligent
creatures. As a possible posture for free persons, atheism is
rooted in a universe which, despite its magnificent luminosity,
is yet incapable of introducing the free creature to a direct
encounter of knowledge and love with his Creator. Ecstatic as
he is over the immediate experience of his own splendor as
discovered in the fascinating union with a universe resplen-
dent and at his service, the creature tends to be drawn almost
inevitably away from the invisible Presence toward an all-
engrossing immersion into the visibly beautiful universe of
matter and men. There arises a quasi-identification of the
created person’s project with the project of an ever-evolving
universe. This identification often enough develops into the
prolonged, permanent, spiritual separation of the creature
from his transcendent Creator. Eventually, lost in the love of
the ever-present and splendid universe, the creature comes to

2 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

possess himself, his society and his world as if they were exclu-
sively his own. The fact that he himself and all creatures are
really the exclusive possession of a transcendent Lover is lost
sight of, or if remembered, resented and rejected, as we shall
see in the course of our study.

Thus atheism arises from a mentality and attitude which
involves a flight from the invisible toward the visible, from the
transcendent toward the immanent, from the spiritual toward
the material in such a way that not only are the invisible, tran-
scendent and spiritual rejected as dimensions of reality, but
they are denied existence itself. Essentially negative in nature,
as etymologically demonstrated from the two Greek words
from which it arises, the negating alpha A and Theos, the word
for God, atheism, nevertheless, makes its thrust from a nega-
tive-affirmative act of freedom. For atheism receives its true,
full meaning from the reality it rejects—God. It represents a
choice the creature makes of himself and his universe in pref-
erence to his Creator. For every temptation to deny God has as
the necessary correlative of this denial the affirmation of the
creature over God. All intelligent and free creatures are chal-
lenged during their lives to choose God. Another way of ex-
pressing this reality is to say that all intelligent and free
creatures are tested to see if they will accept God above them-
selves and their universe by a love of preference. Even Christ,
the God-Man, was not exempted from the temptation to athe-
ism in this sense. When the devil led Christ up to a high moun-
tain to show Him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world,
he was testing Christ to find out if He were more than man and,
if he discovered that Christ was merely man, this same test was
calculated to seduce Christ into a denial of God. Here are the
devils words: “I will give you all this power and their splendor,
for it has been turned over to me, and I can give it to anyone
I please. If you will do homage before me, it shall all be yours.”
But Christ instantly rejected the proposed infidelity: “It is writ-
ten, ‘The Lord thy God shalt thou worship, and Him only shalt
thou serve.’ ”!

The person, therefore, who now professes to be and is an
atheist did not become such overnight. It is important to realize
that. atheism, like any other hardened position and prejudice,

1. Luke 4: 5-8.

Mystery of Atheism 3

normally begins with relatively light, willful stands of rejec-
tion. Often enough the beginnings of atheism can be traced to
intellectual doubts about the existence or goodness of God. The
person is being tested in a crise de foi, crisis of faith. There is
nothing unnatural or evil in such tests, tormenting though they
may be. For God allows these tests in order to give man the
opportunity to grow up into a mature, seasoned fellowship of
love with Himself. Indeed St. Peter could exhort the early
Christians to rejoice “though now for a little while, if need be,
you are made sorrowful by various trials, that the temper of
your faith—more precious by far than gold which is tried in fire
—may be found unto praise and glory and honor at the revela-
tion of Jesus Christ.””

Clearly, then, it is seen that the first shoots of atheism arise
from the ground of man’s infidelity toward God. In the begin-
ning these infidelities may be regretted and resisted, for the
mind and will of man, unlike those of the angels, do not or-
dinarily harden immediately into irrevocable irreconciliation
against God. Somewhere along the line, however, a person per-
mits more frequent infidelities, settles down at peace with
them and finally abandons the fight for fidelity to God al-
together. A decision is firmly made against God. Once the in-
dividual’s denials of God become mentally and volitionally
habitualized, once these denials are incarnated into his goals,
motives, enthusiasms—into his project for life, however natu-
rally noble or humanitarian it may be—once, in a word, his
rejection of God has become wniversalized, then the unbeliever
has raised his particular atheism to the level of a doctrine as
well as of a practice. For such a person atheism becomes a
theory, a principle, as well as a practical way of life, that jus-
tifies metaphysically, theologically and morally all human
thought and endeavor as being necessarily opposed to the very
idea of God.

The fact that men live in a world in which God is neither
visible nor immediately encountered reveals merely the cos-
mic conditions that make atheism a possible human choice.
The causes of atheism, however, always remain within man
himself. In the course of history there have always been athe-
ists, but compared to the overwhelming increase of contempo-

2. 1 Peter 1 : 6-8.

4 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

rary unbelievers atheists in the past were relatively few in
number. Moreover, their atheism was for the most part a
purely private affair. As individuals they usually expressed a
definite, deliberate, dogmatic denial of God’s existence and,
since the coming of Christ, specifically rejected the God of the
Christians’ religious consciousness.

Today, however, the new atheism has attracted millions of
souls throughout the world. In the East the new atheism is
organized, politicalized; its leaders hold the reins of political,
economic and spiritual power. The new atheism refuses to be
treated as an abstract system of thought alongside other inter-
esting bookish systems. Atheism in the East identifies itself as
the most important historical event of all times; it is dynamic,
apostolic, dramatic and demands heroic sacrifices of its adher-
ents; it is scientific, messianic, militant. It has organized and
dominates over a billion people willy nilly in its crusade to
eradicate God from the hearts and minds of men. And in its
mission to make the world totally safe for atheism, it is con-
tinually attacking, plotting, propagandizing so that the sun
never sets on its activities and there is never any time out from
its mission.

At this point we ask ourselves about the state of atheism in
the Christian West. Unfortunately, the West is also seriously ill
with the disease of bland atheism that is rapidly becoming
virulent. Many of its loves are repulsively materialistic; its
morals decadent; its crime rates soaring; quantity has replaced
quality as one of its ideals; its new god is science and tech-
nology; its new allies and alliances are expedient agreements
made with tyrannical regimes at the expense of honesty and
fidelity to the true God and its true friends. Its goal seems to be
peace and prosperity at any price, even the price of changing
its true God for an idol. Thus atheism is widespread today in the
East and West both as a personal and a social disease. Pope Paul
VI, in a speech given at a General Audience on June 14, 1967,
faced with anguish these unpalatable facts: “It would be inter-
esting to make a synthesis of the characteristic objections to
faith in our times. We could observe the way in which many
of these objections proceed from the forma mentis,’ that is,
from the manner of using our knowing faculty which school,
science and the modern mentality have educated into us

Mystery of Atheism 5

almost without our knowing it... In the world of thought
everything is doubted today, and consequently, religion too: It
seems as if the mind of modern man finds no peace except in
total negation, in abandoning any kind of certainty and any
kind of faith. He is like a person with infected eyes who finds
no rest except in obscurity, in darkness. Is the realm of dark-
ness to be the final end of human thinking, of man’s unquench-
able thirst for truth and of his encounter with the living and
true God?”?

Recently an event of world-wide significance took place and
the West’s ignoble response to the significance of this event
only emphasized the West’s contamination with the disease of
the new atheism. On November 7, 1967, Moscow celebrated the
fiftieth anniversary of the rise of Red atheism to tyrannical
power over unhappy, Holy Russia. There was nothing golden
about this anniversary for the people of Russia, for the people
of Christian Eastern Europe, for the Christian people of Cuba,
for the hundreds of millions of Chinese or for the people of the
rest of the world. Yet how did the West for the most part re-
spond to the commemoration and celebration of the fifty-year
advance of triumphant tyranny? Speeches, tributes, cable-
grams poured into Moscow extending glowing congratulations
to that headquarters of hell on earth for having successfully
created a concentration camp of many countries for one billion
souls, a “workers’ paradise lost,” in the title of Eugene Lyons’
recent book.‘

Why were there no statesmen of the free world who dared
recall to their subjects the tremendous cost in millions of bod-
ies, minds, souls who were, and are presently still being, tor-
tured, degraded, murdered that the revolution may continue to
advance? Was it the magnitude and frequency of the crimes
that developed callosities on the Christian consciousness? Why
has the Christian consciousness lost its Christ-like compassion
and sensibility at the afflictions unjustly imposed upon mil-
lions? Moral indifference is the disease of the diluted Christian.
Can it be that Christians of the West have become cold to their
suffering brethren behind iron and bamboo curtains because

3. Pope Paul VI, “Faith and the Modern Mentality” (Chicago: Scepter Pub-
lishers, 1967).
4. Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967).

6 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

they have become cold to Christ? Dull in themselves, have they
become dead to others?

In 1949, on the 23rd of November, Dr. Charles Malik, Chair-
man of the Delegation of Lebanon to the Fourth Session of the
General Assembly of the United Nations made a statement
before the Political Committee of the General Assembly, as-
sessing the malignant evils that the Godless regime in Moscow
had inflicted upon the world and its own people up to that time.
Here is part of that statement:

... Rights that are absolute and unconditional, rights that
are natural and inalienable, rights that inhere in the very
nature and dignity of man as a person are rejected by
Communism and trampled upon by Communist states in
practice... The Communist state... necessarily suffocates
spontaneity, inner dynamism, freedom and diversity. The
spirit of man, which can be itself and its best self only in
freedom and love and genuine communion is choked and
annihilated by totalitarianism ... Man is not respected by
being declared ‘the most precious capital’; for man zs only
when he is viewed as destiny-bearing and a destiny-bur-
dened being, and when his relation to himself and to oth-
ers and to God springs freely and responsibly from the
inner depths of his soul.

And Dr. Malik went on to unmask the pious pretensions to
peace which the Soviet Union was forever propagandizing:

Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular
do not really wish peace. Every peace offensive on the part
of the Soviet Union is but a strategic or tactical device
determined by the particular stage in the development of
a ae It is, in reality, just a phase of an overall war
plané

On November 7, 1967 very few voices in the press and com-
munications media of the free world had the courage to remind
the atheist tyrants, even timidly, of the crimes they have perpe-
trated upon the peoples of the whole world. The tragic fate of
millions of peasants, intellectuals, scientists, poets, musicians
and churchmen under atheist domination is not surprising.

5. Charles Malik, “War and Peace,” speech before UN, (New York: National
Committee for a Free Europe, 1950).

Mystery of Atheism 7

Where heaven is obliterated the earth becomes a jungle. But
what is surprising is that so few in the Christian West, known
as the haven of religious liberty, spoke up to break the eternal
silence of the millions of victims, living and dead, whose voices
should have been heard to challenge the lies that poured forth
from the throat of the Premier of the Red Tyranny in his four-
hour, dithyrambic orgy of self-praise.®

Recalling the immediate liquidation of thousands by the ty-
rants when they took over the reins of government in Russia in
1917 is nightmare enough; far more frightful is the realization
of the slow assassination of millions of others through these
fifty years; unspeakably ghastly has been the prolonged cru-
cifixion of Holy Russia; the steady strangulation of liturgy, lit-
erature, art and prayer has been a sacrilege of a heinous sort.
But perhaps the most satanic project of the fifty years of the
Revolution is its program to extinguish Christian hope or the
hope of any transcendent life hereafter in the hearts of all men.
This is an especially demonic program because hope in an aft-
er-life is all that is left to men, already condemned to death as
all are, a hope that alone can sustain and inspire men to make
something worthwhile of the present life.

When we realize how silent religious leaders of the West
have been in the face of this project for despair, we cannot fail
to ask, “Why has this attack on Christian hope raised such little
counter-attack in the West? Why have even the Catholic com-
munication media—press, radio, TV—been so paralyzed before
this anti-theistic assault?” One had hardly grown reluctantly
accustomed to this apathetic scandal of silence, when a new
and far more detestable scandal was enacted in the West. One
is rendered speechless with astonishment at this new perver-
sion. Attaining the same end as the Communist project to extin-
guish Christian hope, the horror of this new crime arises from

6. In reading many periodicals of European and American origin, the only
organ of eloquent, hopeful protest against the fifty years of Soviet tyranny I
was able to find was that of National Review, a fortnightly published in New
York City. In its lest-we-forget October 31, 1967, issue entitled “50 Years of
Soviet Communism,” NR looks at the half-century Red Revolution through the
minds and hearts of some twenty artist-witnesses whose literary masterpieces
so vividly recount the evil news of this godless aggression that the reader is
shaken with compassion for the millions of captives behind the iron and bam-
boo curtains. In contrast, all other accounts seemed fascinated with the success
of the Red aggression and implied it was here to stay.

8 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the fact that the project to destroy hope is now undertaken and
carried through not by professional atheists but by men who,
through special training, positions and duties, are supposed to
be dedicated Christian leaders. Priests and bishops, whose vo-
cation it is to sustain and foster faith and hope in themselves
and among the faithful, have become the advocates for the
prostitution of religion to the purposes of atheism. When or-
dained ministers and consecrated bishops tell the faithful that
“God is dead,” when these teachers of the Gospels declare their
inability to accept any longer the Virgin Birth, the Divinity of
Christ, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Real Presence, the
immortality of the soul, hell, heaven, sin, grace, redemption,
when, under the guise of re-izterpreting Holy Scripture, these
teachers repudiate Christianity, then has the spirit of Anti-
Christ become incarnate in men and the most demonic form of
atheism is attacking the Mystical Body of Christ. For then a
most grotesque drama is being enacted before the eyes of hor-
rified Christendom in that its anointed ones have become athe-
ists and, still vested as angels of light, they “disown the Lord”
in His own house, cause truth to be maligned, introduce de-
structive sects into the Church, exploit the faithful with spe-
cious arguments and lead many to follow their ungodly ways.

Is it any wonder then that Dr. Charles Malik, towards the end
of his statement on War and Peace, speaking as a sympathetic
friend who loves Christianity and all that the Christian West
stands for in its ideals, could yet, nevertheless, honestly set
forth the decadence of the West in these words:

There are many phases of Western life which are repul-
sively materialistic. The spirit of business and gain, the
maddening variety of things exciting your concupiscence,
the utter selfishness of uncoordinated activity, all this is
not something to attract and inspire ... To the superficial
observer who is unable to penetrate to the core of love and
truth which is still at the heart of the West, there is little
to choose between the soulless materialism of the West
and the militant materialism of the East ... There is a
general weakening of moral fibre. One gains the impres-
sion that the great fund of moral strength which has been
handed down from the tears and labours of the ages is not
being creatively replenished . . . I must say in all humility
that the leadership of the West in general does not seem

Mystery of Atheism 9

to be adequate to the unprecedented challenges of the
age.”

From what has been said so far, atheism is seen as perhaps
the most serious spiritual affiiction of modern man. There is no
dimension of man’s activities that has not withered under the
destructive voracity of this parasite. Earlier in this chapter we
merely indicated some of the stunting effects this blight has
had on theological thought, political practice and morals.
These will be developed further as our study progresses. But
first a closer scrutiny must be given to the roots and forms of
atheism.

We have already indicated that atheism is not a blind, innate,
untaught, instinctive posture for intelligent creatures. Rather
it is a conscious, voluntary, even premeditated development in
man. To be sure it stems from a variety of causes and is ani-
mated by any number of powerful motives. However, none of
these motives, taken singly or all together, for that matter,
produces or can explain the atheistic man. In the final analysis,
therefore, the phenomenon of atheism will have to be seen as
the choice of a free person, influenced by certain circum-
stances, to be sure, some under and some beyond his control,
and driven on by certain motives, all freely fostered however,
to break off communion with God irrevocably. A man becomes
an atheist because he wants to be an atheist; he wills to be an
atheist. Looked at under this light of self-determination
against, of self-alienation from God, atheism appears to be
much more than a problem; it is a mystery in the meaning
given this word by Gabriel Marcel. A look into this creative,
classic distinction will prove most fruitful and enable us to
understand the nature of atheism more profoundly.

A problem is a mental investigation undertaken with respect
to an object. A problem bears on something completely outside
the investigator. Man becomes an observer before a problem,
scrutinizing the object from all sides. And there exists a com-
plete answer to the problem which, given enough time and
developing enough know-how, man will eventually obtain. Ob-
jectified thought solves problems. But man as a person, as a
subject, is not involved in the solution or make-up of a problem.

7. Dr. Charles Malik, “War and Peace.”

10 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Scientific knowledge embodies, par excellence, the prob-
lematic approach to things, to objects.

However, when a man is dealing with realities which cannot
be objectified, he cannot use effectively the problematic ap-
proach to these realities if he would grow in a valid understand-
ing of them. Why? Because such realities do not exist solely
outside the knower; such realities necessarily include and in-
volve the knower as a subject. For example, I cannot regard
freedom as outside myself, nor myself as outside freedom.
Freedom, as such, is not an object for it includes me and it
includes me as a subject who is quite concerned about my free-
dom and the freedom of my fellow man. Here we have a vision
of the greater, the infinite range of the mystery of being. Every
question bearing on a mystery recoils upon the questioning
subject who will never be able to give a perfect answer or
produce a perfect solution to the question. The reason is that
the area of the mystery being investigated is ontologically infi-
nite, too profoundly fruitful to be fully comprehended by the
limited mind of man. Love, participation in being, hope, free-
dom and their contraries hate, alienation, despair, serfdom are
not merely problems; they are inexhaustible mysteries in this
non-theological sense of the word. For these realities involve
each human subject in his ontological, intellectual, psychologi-
cal and historical developments.

If we look at man as he really is known in our concrete expe-
rience, we see that his reality is built on the metaphysical fact
that his being has its origin in participation in being. His nature
craves further participation in being and all his activities are
a driving toward a goal which consists in perfect participation
in being, in communion with his fellowmen and with the Tran-
scendent. We see that each person’s dynamic, physical and
metaphysical nature, from its very conception, grows up au-
tomatically, spontaneously reaching out for more being, for the
plenitude of being. At the moment when the person dramati-
cally breaks the barrier of the womb and appears on the stage
of world history, he is caught in the acts of crying, clutching,
straining to grasp, to be with other persons and things, to attain
greater degrees of being. This spontaneous language of cries
and gestures revealing the hunger for greater being testifies to
man’s innate drive to transcend himself, not merely horizon-

Mystery of Atheism 11

tally to men and things but also vertically to God. Thus, ‘to be’
means ‘to be with’; for man especially, esse est co-esse. Human
existence, if it is to be authentically human, must be existence
in communion. Isolation and alienation are the death of hum
an persons. In a metaphysical depth far below the sociological
surface, “No man is an island.”

As a man grows up through physical to intellectual aware-
ness, he is called upon to translate the natural, spontaneous at-
traction of his nature for greater being into a reasonable,
conscious, free, loving decision to be with the other; he is called
upon to donate himself to the other—to things, his fellowmen,
God. Only in giving himself in this reasonable manner does man
discover and develop his full person, his subjecthood, his 7. Now
the fact that man is free and able to refuse to be with the other
renders the future of man ambiguous. Sooner or later, and in-
deed quite frequently in his life, the great crisis and challenge
comes to every man: Shall I say Yes or No to the Thou? And this
brings us full circle to our explanation of atheism. Communion
is a form of freedom, of love; it isnot a problem; it is a mystery in
which every man is involved. Communion is the free gift of the
self offered and accepted between an Jand a Thou; it is mutual
surrender of love. No matter how often experienced, commun-
ion is an inexhaustible mystery of love; it will always be the
cause of eternal wonderment. Now atheism is the contrary of
communion vis 4 vis the Absolute Thou; it is the mystery of the
great refusal. Yet man’s greatest dignity consists in this: His
metaphysical need and hunger for greater being, for the pleni-
tude of being, testifies to the infinite goal to which he is called.
He is called to consummate conversation and communion with
the Absolute Thou. The atheist deliberately attempts to break
his vital, intimate bond of communion with God. He refuses to
transcend, to go up higher at the invitation of his nature and the
Author of his nature. The atheist says: “I will not ascend.”

To the believer the atheist is a mystery; to the atheist the
believer is a mystery. Somehow man must try to understand
both to the best of his ability. What the atheist does not see is
that in rejecting God he rejects himself. In refusing to give
himself in spirit to God, he refuses to transcend himself in the
experience of a felt and lived communion with God. In effect
he banishes God from his own horizon and exiles himself from

14 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

is not an idea, nor the conclusion of a syllogism, nor the con-
quest of a positivistic process. He is mystery, presence, gift; not
problem, idea or object.

Moreover, we saw how the possibility of choosing atheism is
simultaneously the opportunity of choosing God. Atheism is
possible in order that man may accept the challenge to choose
God and make that choice of God with the same qualitative love
of preference with which God chose to love, create and dwell
with man. In other words, atheism is possible in order that the
whole man, knowing and loving, may attain the moral heights
of being with God through his free cooperation. If God could be
accepted with the same ease as we accept the law of gravity,
faith and love of preference as priceless moral values would no
longer be existent. And man could no longer follow his noblest
vocation—his struggle to participate in God’s moral goodness.
God has to be won, to be achieved as the result of a long struggle
that overcomes many difficulties. Only the violent bear Him
away or, to be more correct, are borne away by Him. There is
no easy way to God. The person who sulks in atheism because
he has no sensible evidence, no solid physical facts for God’s
existence opens himself to the critique of being petulantly un-
reasonable in demanding what is impossible.

But there has to be some form of evidence of God’s existence
if the acceptance of God is to be reasonable. And, of course,
there is. There exists the evidence of spiritual experience, evi-
dence which is of a meta-problematic order, different from but
complementary to the objective evidence of facts found in the
universe of physical things. Man, in encountering his universe,
experiences the facts of an infinite multiplicity and apparent
chaos of being. Entering into these facts with what Gabriel
Marcel calls “secondary reflection,” that is, with a personalized
recollection and intimate reflection, the whole man—the ra-
tional, affective, moral being—experiences the presence of the
Transcendent in the intelligibility, beauty, order—physical and
moral—encountered in men and things. Man obtains a secure
knowledge of God’s existence as the Necessary implied by the
contingent, the Absolute Truth supposed by his own growing
truth, the Perfect Good commanding his own moral maturity.
Thus the Transcendent becomes present and communes with
man from within as well as from without. Now the universe
of things and men appeal to and seize not merely the knower’s

Mystery of Atheism 15

abstract reason, but the whole man, sense and soul. True, as
Daniélou has demonstrated, God’s cosmic coveriant with man,
as read in the book of creation, does not lead the religiously
pagan soul unerringly “to that living God who is so near at hand
and yet so far.” In the darkness of his fallen nature, the reli-
gious pagan misunderstands the message of “the cosmos, the
conscience and the spirit” and falls into idolatry. But at least he
maintains his quest for that unknown God about whom Denys
truly said: “We know well that He is, and what He is not. But
what He is remains for us entirely unknown.” °

Only God’s positive revelation of Himself—initially through
Abraham and the Jews, finally in its splendid fullness in Jesus
Christ—could bring fallen man to a realization of the truth
enunciated by St. Paul: “In Him we live and move and have our
being . . . And in Him all things hold together.” Thus, atheism
is possible because man can reject this living, personal experi-
ence of the presence of the Transcendent even after he has
sifted the event by reason and found it was not an illusion but
a solid conviction based on and arrived at through a consistent
relationship with the objective data of reality. Man may reject
this living event as being unscientific, too subjective and, there-
fore, lacking the rigor of perfect proof. Atheism is possible
because there exists a human attitude that demands that God
be proven like the correct answer to a problem, or the discovery
of a new law of physics. The rigidity of the scientific method
denies that anyone who is invisible can be validly discovered as
a presence, accepted as a person or lived with as a friend.

We mentioned obstacles that must be overcome by man if he
is to know and accept God. It is the seriousness of these very
obstacles that gives atheism a positive value, that gives it the
appealing appearance of possessing some truth. Pascal caught
this value in his pithy critique: “Atheism is an indication of
spiritual vigor, but only to a certain degree.”!! Viewing atheism
from the Christian’s position, de Lubac wisely asserted that the
more we believe in God, the more we are atheists as to false
gods.!?

We might express some of the difficulties that make atheism

10. Jean Daniélou, God And The Ways Of Knowing (Cleveland, Ohio: World
Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1965).

11. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, III, 225; p. 431.

12. Henri de Lubac, S.J., Tke Drama of Atheist Humanism (New York and
Cleveland: Meridian Books, World Publishing Company, 1965).

16 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

not only possible but also plausible in the form of a metaphor.
Every man is beckoned to ascend the mountain of the universe
for a rendezvous with God at the summit. But the climb that
leads to God is studded with desolate steeps where death stalks
to claim the headlong and the foolhardy. The prudent climber
humbly prepares himself to scale the peaks, crags, rocks; to
cross the chasms; to maneuver successfully the weight of his
supplies; to provide beforehand for the density and debility of
the senses, the dizziness of heights and the frigidity of the
atmosphere. Applied to real life, the believer patiently and pru-
dently scales the peaks of pain, the crags of evil, the chasm of
death; he overcomes the hardships and obscurities of the climb;
the debilities of his body and the treachery of his surroundings
do not deter him from his goal. Aided by light from the summit,
for which he has prayed, he avoids blind alleys and eventually
attains God, albeit, like Moses, shrouded and protected in the
clouds of creation, he attains God in the brilliant darkness of
reason and faith. Nevertheless, he is certain that God is in
those clouds, beyond them, nay more, in himself, nearer to him-
self than he is to his own being. Passage through the last portal
of suffering—death—will alone usher him into face to face
communion with God.

Now the atheist objects to the difficulties of the climb. How
can an all-good God obstruct the ascent to Himself with such
abominable barriers—death, sin, evil, pain, poverty, ignorance,
slavery? Only a cruel, a despotic God could arrange such an
inhuman situation, such utter absurdity. The truth is that such
a God is an illusion, a convenient human projection whereby
man hopes to make this life bearable by putting his hopes in a
future life of happiness guaranteed by his own God. The atheist
cries that there is no one beyond his marvelous senses, his
brilliant mind. There is no one in or beyond the spinning plan-
ets, the billions of gallaxies. As he studies the universe, under
the glow of his declaration of his independence from God, the
atheist sees that the universe seems stable enough in itself and
has no need of a God. The universe beckons him, godless, liber-
ated, with wondrous powers of body and mind, to scale its
heights on his own, and harness its limitless, secret resources
for his own health and wealth. As he views the misery of the
masses in poverty, ignorance and disease, he is fired to purify

Mystery of Atheism ` 17

society with violence if need be, of its avaricious establish-
ment, built upon the myths and morals of organized religion; he
vows to enthrone man at the summit as his own God.

Thus modern atheism is no longer merely a speculative sys-
tem aimed at proving in a rational manner that the existence
of God is neither actual nor possible. The modern atheist is not
an atheist because he is incapable of finding and using the
means to encounter God. Indeed, his denial of God is his choice
of a crusade against God. Dostoyevsky, that brilliant prophet
and fearless judge of our times, demonstrated in his novels,
which are full of all types of atheists, that the contemporary,
learned, liberalistic, collectivist humanist is far less an atheist
than he is an anti-atheist.!? The contemporary atheist does not
love God, rather he hates God. That is the secret of his orgy of
anti-atheism. In the final analysis of our tortured era, the su-
preme reason for its darkness of despair is the word that arises
from the depths of its being. Out of the bitter abundance of its
heart our embittered age screams at God: “No! We will not
serve you! We will not love you! We will love and serve man
without you!”

What contemporary adventurers in atheism have failed to
see, as de Lubac so soberly observes, is that “man cannot organ-
ize the world for himself without God; without God he can only
organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhu-
man humanism.” Consequently the orgy of antitheism is infi-
nitely more heinous than the mere mental revolt of atheism.
Indeed modern atheists are activists against God; they proudly
participate in the madman’s delirium over the assassination of
God, with this difference, that their’s is a joyful while the mad-
man’s was a sorrowful delirium. “We have killed him [God]—
you and I!—Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely
to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event!”!5

Thus the secular humanists, exulting in this “crime of
crimes,” this “heroism of heroisms,” admit that they did not
bring about the “murder of God” in an accidental manner. They
planned the deed; they knew what they were doing. First they

13. Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov; The Possessed; Journal of
an Author; A Raw Youth and others.

14. de Lubac, op. cit, p. ix.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. T. Common; English
translation, ed. O. Levy (New York: Macmillan, 1910) Vol. 10, p. 125.

18 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

cleverly dissolved God and religion as a myth, using the acidly
erosive power of scientific rationalism. Man, in his adolescent
fears and insecurities, had built up this myth over the centuries
by projecting his own aspirations for permanency, peace and
happiness into an Absolute Good and an eternal heaven. The
here was horrible; the hereafter would be heavenly. But our
learned athesits, the avant-garde of humanity-come-of-age, il-
lumined with scientific vision and animated with prophetic
zeal, irrevocably erased the horizon of a heavenly hereafter.
Dutifully they accepted the responsibility of creating heaven
here on earth; they accepted the role of being the creators of
history and of history’s destiny. Presently they are at work
feverishly founding the opulent, cultural, Secular City. Tomor-
row, as atheism advances, will dawn a universally desacralized
civilization. Eventually, when atheism is fully triumphant, a
celebration is planned for the advent of the Christless Cosmos
by the first world-wide Godless generation.

It would be a mistake to take today’s atheists as mere dream-
ers. They know what they want; they have drawn up plans
about how they are going to get it; their books are everywhere
to be read, their actions everywhere to be witnessed. They know
the obstacles that stand in the way of their Christless Cosmos.
They are forever developing and improving techniques to
eradicate these obstacles. They are at total war with the reli-
gious consciousness of men. They rightly see as their most
deadly enemy the religious consciousness of Christians. Thus,
contemporary atheism, in its messianic drive to bring all men
into the fold of its religionless utopia, is quick to use all forms
of spiritual coercion and physical violence. It is fanatically
determined to eradicate the religious consciousness of man. In
order that it may successfully implant an alien secularized
consciousness in men, modern atheism has developed a fixed,
rigid philosophy of human nature and of the cosmos; in the
West it is organized into an Establishment through a kinship of
humanism and progressivism; in the East and in Cuba it is
organized into a political monolith; everywhere it has adopted
an arbitrary code of ethics; it employs flexible, conspiratorial
tactics and in its messianic imperialism it excludes no man or
thing from insertion, forcible or otherwise, into its “great, uni-
form ant-hill” hegemony.

Dostoyevsky has delineated the principal types of pernicious

Mystery of Atheism 19

atheism in modern times under the symbolism of three images.
These images represent the ideals of atheism for mankind. De
Lubac points out the meaning of these images. “The ideal of the
‘man-God,’ the ideal of the ‘Tower of Babel’ and the ideal of the
‘palace of glass’—these three images are ready to hand, respec-
tively denoting the spiritual ideal of the individual who is a law
unto himself, the social ideal of the revolutionary who proposes
to insure, without God, the happiness of mankind, and the ra-
tional ideal of the philosopher who rejects every kind of mys-
tery. In the concrete reality of the Dostoevskian universe, these
three types—types of inverted faith rather than of pure dis-
belief—are intermingled in a variety of permutations and com-
binations.”?®

Dostoevsky brilliantly unmasks these forms of ideal atheistic
humanism so as to reveal them for what they are in their meta-
physical, moral and theological nakedness—the most effi-
ciently ruthless systems ever devised for inflicting upon society
man’s inhumanity to man. And he relentlessly demonstrates
the bankruptcy of these systems, predicts the triumph of the
God-Man over the man-God in the soul of society and man’s
resurrection beyond the Stygian stable of atheistic humanism.

The plan in this book is to demonstrate how every form of
atheism, even the initially well intentioned, constricts, shrinks,
enslaves the individual atheist within and against himself and,
eventually, as atheism reaches plague proportions among men,
goes on to enslave and murder society. I hope to justify this
study by showing how organized atheism is the greatest social
engineer of falsehood and human degradation in our times.
Finally, I hope to suggest means whereby man can successfully
thwart these adventures in atheism and invite him to go beyond
atheism, to ascend to the infinitely expansive level of self-
donation in being, the level of friendship with God where God
and men share all gifts in the Gift of the God-Man. Man must
go beyond atheism or be driven on by his own stubborn pride
and hate to the void of social and spiritual suicide.

16. Henri de Lubac, op. cit., p. 188.

CHAPTER II

XA

AA
orn

PA
id

Feuerbach:
Humanity Becomes God

LUDWIG FEUERBACH (1804-1872) PUBLISHED HIS BOOK
The Essence of Christianity in 1841. Immediately he was
hailed as a new Prometheus. Why? His spiritual training and
development will give us the answer.

Ludwig Feuerbach, raised in a solidly Christian family, went
to Heidelberg University, because he wanted to become a Prot-
estant minister. God was his first love, theology his all-consum-
ing interest. On campus, however, he ran smack into a
students’ revolt against religious authorities. He was shocked
at the brutal suppression of the revolt by the State police who
were called in by the spiritual powers. He was enraged and
embittered at the punishment inflicted upon his two brothers
who at Erlangen were leaders in a secret organization that
directed the revolt there. Young Feuerbach, shaken in his alle-
giance to the Church, began to move away from theology to-
ward philosophy. He left Heidelberg and enrolled at the
University of Berlin where the great Hegel was lecturing.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 21

Meeting Hegel completely revolutionized his life. In Feuer-
bach’s own words Hegel became his “second father,” Berlin the
place of his “spiritual rebirth.” For two years he attended He-
gel’s lectures. Moreover, he was on intimate terms with Hegel
—more so than with any of his other professors. Hegel liberated
him from “the clutches of the dirty clerics.” His very disserta-
tion was on the basic doctrine of Hegel’s philosophy, “on rea-
son, the one, the universal, the infinite,” where he developed
reason as the supreme metaphysical principle, the first cause
of all things, “the all-embracing, universal, true abode of all
things and subjects.” Thus, Feuerbach now saw as unquestiona-
bly situated solely in Reason perfections, such as unity, univer-
sality and infinity, which were formerly and normally
attributed solely to God. Under Hegel’s influence Feuerbach
broke with theology, considering it merely as a past phase in
man’s intellectual progression. He now advanced beyond Chris-
tianity, passionately demanded the total divorce of philosophy
from theology, called for a “new religion of action” and insisted
on man’s undivided concentration on this world so that an “effi-
cient, spiritually and physically sound people” could be formed
from this revolutionizing liberation from the Absolutist God.

De Lubac tells us that “in the years that followed Hegel’s
death in 1831, the focus of philosophical debates was the prob-
lem of God, and it was on this subject, and not primarily on
political and social matters, that the split occurred between the
right and left wings of Hegelianism.”!

Now Hegel, the progenitor of a famous brood that split into
two factions at war with each other, was far from being an
atheist himself. Nevertheless, he set the stage for the assault
upon God. It was generally agreed that God was the object of
both philosophy and theology; of the former by the light of
reason, of the latter by the light of revelation, But Hegel ques-
tioned whether the philosophers or the theologians had suc-
ceeded in attaining the real God. He protested that the God of
Christian experience was an inadequate, a premature, not-yet-
developed God. Hegel set himself the task of completing the
good news of the Gospels; he would go beyond Christianity by
demonstrating that the only valid God was dialectically evolv-
ing Thought or Spirit Which gradually, inevitably attains and

1. Henri de lubac, op. cit, p. 8.

22 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

reveals Itself in conceptual clarity and complete self-con-
sciousness through the entire scope of cosmic and human his-
tory. Hegel set himself the mission of rescuing the God of
Christianity from the vagueness of imagery, the symbolism of
myths, the simplistic charm of parables.

Moreover, Hegel had a bill of particulars against the Chris-
tian God. The trouble with the Christian God is that He is only
experienced and remembered when the human conscience is
sick or in trouble. But this Jewish-Christian God, Who is unap-
proachable and inscrutable in His aloof transcendence and
unattainable by the imagination, mind or heart of man, arouses
in man resentment against the only choice he is offered by this
mysterious God—obedience or revolt. Frustrated by the demor-
alizing experience of failing futilely to satisfy his hunger for
communion with the transcendent God, humbled by the de-
grading knowledge of his abject powerlessness, man resents
the situation that equates God’s glorification with his own
depreciation. The transcendent God of the Old and New Testa-
ments thus succeeds in enslaving and alienating His worship-
pers. He sets before them the face-to-face eternal embrace of
Himself as a goal that is actually beyond man’s personal
achievement. Yet He continually tortures man’s metaphysical
hunger as if this human aspiration for complete communion
were actually attainable. In effect, says Hegel, the Judaeo-
Christian God is a cruel tyrant Who fosters between Himself
and men the infamous dialectical relationship of master and
slave.

Despite the apparent liberation of the spirit found in the New
Testament, the apparent snapping of the bonds of Fate, the
seemingly magnificent release from the master-slave degrada-
tion, Hegel brands Judaeo-Christianity as a backward religion,
a religion of endless, hopeless waiting whose devotees are
either wandering in a desert looking for a land flowing with
milk and honey or sighing in a vale of tears scanning the hori-
zon for the advent of the new heaven and earth beyond time.
Idle Christians, it turns out, are only more sickly replicas of
wandering Jews, the former incurably looking for the second
coming, the latter still alerted for the first, of the Messiah. Both
suffer from “unhappy consciences” which beget not true reli-
gion but sentimental religiosity. Both are forever hoping for the

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 23

unreal, the impossible. Both are always away in another world,
unemployed and sterile in this world of great affairs and chal-
lenges. Christianity is the old slavery under a milder regime.
The New Testament demands the rejection of this world even
as the Old did. Both insist God is apart, beyond, divorced from
this world which at best is a sinners’ prison, an exiles’ passing
and dying city.

Hegel’s basic opposition to the Jewish and Christian religions
is that they create men who can be witnesses and martyrs for
the next world, but never “heroes of action” in this. These reli-
gions forever forbid their faithful to aspire to the glory of the
Titans, the heroism of Lucifer, the adventure of Faust.

Hegel concluded that Christianity was a social and historical
failure. For souls who are withdrawn by religious conviction
from their age can never create a great civilization; they can
only produce a spiritless era in which men reluctantly endure
the happenings of time for the happiness of eternity. The
Judaeo-Christian God is all too purely transcendent, so far out
of this world as to be irrelevant.

In one sense this failure of the God of Revelation was una-
voidable. After all, was not this God a mere antithesis of the
dialectical evolution of Spirit? Hellenism, with its serene gods
of immanence and order, was the thesis of evolving Thought.
Christianity, with its tragically crucified God, was the antithe-
sis. Hegel’s God and Hegel’s religion is the synthesis of these
two—the reformed, the mature, the complete God. The Chris-
tian God had to die, to pass into its opposite—the absolute into
the relative, the infinite into the finite, the eternal into the
temporal, the transcendent into the immanent—in order that
the valid God might lose and find himself again on a higher
level of self-consciousness in the unfolding drama of cosmic
history which is the drama of the self-achievement of the total,
conscious being of God. By participating in this world-drama

_and committing himself to the development of this history,
man will fulfill his authentic role as a hero of action and ex-
pand his liberty to meaningful dimensions. His greatest glory
is to cooperate willingly in the achievement of the fullness of
the being of the immanent God of perfect self-Consciousness.

Hegel succeeded in paganizing Christianity, demythologiz-
ing the Gospels and creating a religion of the cosmic, integrat-

24 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ing, evolutionary Absolute in cooperation with whose dialecti-
cal maturation to perfect self-consciousness man would find
his own greatness, even though man himself is a mere dialecti-
cal moment destined to personal obliteration on that dialecti-
cal journey. All modern atheism will thus be seen to be rooted
in Hegel’s rejection of the God of the master-slave relationship,
the God who begets an “unhappy conscience” in man, the God
who reduces man from being a hero to being a “beautiful soul.”

Now Feuerbach, leader of the left-wing Hegelians, was pro-
foundly influenced by Hegel’s challenge to the God of Chris-
tianity. He was especially impressed with Hegel’s doctrine of
the religious alienation of man in the master-slave relationship
with the Christian God. But he disagreed radically with what
had been done by Hegel to correct this unhappy relationship.
The God of Christian experience did not need to be reformed;
man himself needed to be reformed; man did not need to be
rescued from the Christian God; he needed to be rescued from
his own illusions about God. If there was one truth the noble
soul and the “unhappy conscience” of man pointed to it was
that the whole idea of God as the Absolute Other was sheer
illusion.

Feuerbach saw the inevitable outcome of Hegel’s reduction
of God from the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus to the
God of the philosophers and scientists. He saw that the God of
the fifth Gospel—the gospel of reason according to Hegel—was
merely a man-made God, sprung full-blown from the Hegélian
head. Taking his inspiration, however, from Hegel’s work as a
beginning which was going in the right direction, Feuerbach
set himself to account psychologically for the illusion of all
religion. He realized that Hegel had already demolished God
without even suspecting his own great accomplishment. Feuer-
bach successfully drew the logical conclusions of Hegel’s work
in his book The Essence of Christianity. In an heroic manner
he continued the process of the reduction of God to the being
of man and, indeed, of all theology to anthropology.

It was quite understandable, then, that the left-wing Hegeli-
ans, upon seeing God falling from heaven under the assault of
this new Titan, were filled with enthusiasm and rallied round
him as a leader more courageous than Hegel himself, a leader
who dared the ultimate act—the annihilation of God. Feuer-

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 25

bach was seen as having ascended above the throne of God and
having brought down to earth not only new fire, but heaven and
the God of heaven’s fire himself. Feuerbach was acclaimed for
having swept the heavens clean of the phantom of God, exor-
cised this sacred sorcerer from the consciousness of his age,
broken forever this theological tyrant’s fatalistic, master-slave
domination of men, restored divinity to its rightful owner—
liberated Humanity—and rendered the thousands of years’ dis-
cussions about God henceforth pointless.

In the words of Karl Barth, “Feuerbach’s teaching was essen-
tially a summons, an appeal, a proclamation.” He wrote in
order to restore man to his innate dignity. It was Feuerbach’s
contention that the Christian idea of man, far from liberating
man, actually succeeded in enslaving him to an illusory abso-
lute. How did Feuerbach arrive at this conclusion? Was he the
victim of the slow secularization of Christianity which
preceded his times and how much does he contribute by his own
writings to the loss of the Christian mind that plagues our
times? These are the questions we hope to explore and answer
in this chapter.

Feuerbach was a modern philosopher who, by his own admis-
sion, was totally preoccupied with the problem of theology. “All
my writings,” he wrote, “have had, strictly speaking, one pur-
pose, one intention, one theme. This is nothing else than reli-
gion and theology and whatever is connected with them.”* As
one conversant with the history of theology, Feuerbach knew
that Christianity broke upon an ancient, pagan world, bur-
dened down with countless gods, spirits, demons and controlled
implacably by the tyrannical stars and Fates above, as the great
Liberator. For Christianity emancipated man from the meta-
physical matrix of Fatalism. Its good news proclaimed that
man is the effect of infinite, creative Love. A divine seal within
man’s nature reflects, however dimly yet unmistakably, the
ineffable nature of his Absolute Creator. Reason, liberty, im-
mortality, providence over cosmos and community are divine
endowments which God shares with man, His favorite image.
No longer caught on the wheel of irrational and eternal recur-

2. Karl Barth, Introductory Essay to The Essence of Christianity, p. xi.
3. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen Der Religion, (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner Ver-
lag), p. 3.

26 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

rence, no longer the historical plaything of blind chance, no
longer a mere spark from the world-soul that moves within the
iron circle of cosmopolitan necessitarianism, man, liberated by
Christianity, rejoiced in a world expanded with newly revealed
horizons for intelligence, freedom, love. Each man, one by one,
was now seen to be the known, the chosen, the person individu-
ally embraced by the Absolute Lover. “I have loved you with an
everlasting love, therefore have I chosen you, taking pity on
you.”

The initial emotions that Christianity released in a converted
world that was formerly pagan and idolatrous were those of
intense, exhilarating gladness, radiant joy, triumphant ap-
plause, inexpressibly peaceful relief at the deliverance from
fatalism and the reception of new human life in the divine
family of the Holy Trinity. At last the true Transcendent was
really known as the One, True God in three distinct Lovers—the
Father of Men, the Saviour of men, the Advocate of men. From
now on man’s greatness was to consist in his grateful recogni-
tion of his divine origins and in his enthusiastic cooperation for
the attainment of his divine destiny—eternal, supernatural
communion within the unveiled family of God.

It was true that Christianity reminded man that he was and
would ever remain during his life on earth wounded by sin. As
a result of his sin and its consequent ravages in his mind, will
and whole being, Christianity incessantly warned man that he
would have to combat daily until the moment of his death the
assaults of the world, the flesh, the devil and, above all, his own
inordinate nature, if he seriously hoped to attain his sublime
destiny. But Christianity assured man that in Christ, the Re-
deemer, and in His message and mission entrusted to His Liv-
ing Church man would find all the power needed to overcome
his debilities and the superabundant graces needed for his
sanctification.

Here was a message and mission capable of keeping man
young in spirit, vital, free, creative and, above all, joyously
striving to grow up in Christ, despite the rampant ravages of
sin in history all around him. Here was a message and mission
that would develop man and his cosmos to divine greatness,
while it overthrew the powers of evil in the visible and invisible
worlds.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 27

But when Feuerbach looked at the world of his times, he
discovered an astonishing phenomenon. Ilusion, indecision,
immorality were rampant in a supposedly Christian civiliza-
tion. The fact was, however, that Europe was no longer Chris-
tian; it had cut itself adrift from its Christian moorings in the
revolts and apostasies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. Most men still professed Christianity in word, but lived
atheism in deed. Feuerbach was already witnessing the fulfill-
ment of Renan’s sagacious prophecy. Philosopher-historian
who lost his faith in the seminary of St. Sulpice, Renan, a con-
temporary of Feuerbach, wrote: “It is possible that the collapse
of supernatural belief will be followed by the collapse of moral
convictions and that the moment when humanity sees the real-
ity of things will mark a real moral decline. We are living on
the perfume of an empty vase.”4 Yet, even though men were
no longer moved by the Christian ideal and no longer strove for
supernatural greatness, they were, nevertheless, still haunted
by the perfume of that vase. Feuerbach himself testified that
“because of its indecisive half-heartedness and lack of charac-
ter ... the superhuman and supernatural essence of ancient
Christianity still haunts the minds of men—at least as a
ghost.”® He planned to dissolve the ghost, dispel the perfume.
He made it his sacred mission to restore man’s spiritual coher-
ency by “erasing this most rotten stain, the stain of our present
history.” He would break man’s ties to both God and Christian-
ity, myths that held a guilt-ridden society in total bondage.

All the young fellow-Hegelians of the left applauded Feuer-
bach’s “world-moving step” which “with unrouged truth de-
masks Christian and philosophical hypocrisy,” as Rouge so
enthusiastically described this mission. Indeed the adventure
for atheism thrilled the young Hegelians. Marx and Bauer pro-
jected the publication of an Archive For Atheists aimed at
being more brazenly atheist than Rouge’s German Yearbooks.
Thus by 1841 the “religious mask” was thrown to the winds and
Rouge could write: “Bruno Bauer (and Marx)... and Feuerbach
have already reached the summit and planted the flag of athe-

4, Quoted by Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean in Christian Counter-attack,
Blandford Press, (London: 1969) p. 18.

5. Ludwig Feuerbach, Tke Essence of Christianity, translated by George

Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. 15.
6. Ibid., p. 15.

28 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ism and mortality; God, religion and immortality are hereby
deposed, and the philosophers’ Republic, Man, and the new gods
of Man proclaimed.” Without Hegel, therefore, Feuerbach
might never have formulated so precisely the nature of modern
humanistic atheism. Yet he was also influenced by his friend
Friedrich David Strauss, who specialized in interpreting the
origins of Christianity. Strauss claimed he had accounted for
the Christian illusion through his study of the Jewish people.
Feuerbach, paralleling his friend’s effort, claimed he could ac-
count for the Christian illusion in particular, and for the illu-
sion of religion in general, through psychological and
anthropological causes. In his Life of Jesus, Strauss developed
the theory that the gospels were the myths embodying the aspi-
rations of the Jewish people. In his Essence of Religion, Feuer-
bach reached a similar conclusion in his field of endeavor,
proclaiming that God is merely a myth which embodies the
highest aspirations of the human consciousness. “Those who
have no desires,” he wrote, “have no Gods . . . Gods are men’s
wishes in corporeal form.’”®

Thus, according to Karl Barth, “Feuerbach worked with an
energy surpassed by few contemporaries of his stamp precisely
in order to displace religion.”® Now two theses control the de-
velopment of Feuerbach’s atheistic humanism. The first, a
negative thesis, develops Hegal’s idea of alienation. However,
Feuerbach does not apply this concept as Hegel had done, to
dialectically evolving Mind, but to man—that flesh and blood
creature who exists only in community, whose being is found
only in the unity of man with man—the unity of I and Thou.
Now this man with man—the unity of I and Thou—this being
of man in community—this is God. The true dialectic is no
monologue of lonely Thinker with Himself, but a dialogue be-
tween I and Thou.” Alienation, in Feuerbach’s sense, arises in
man when man discovers that, in his struggle for a better life,
his existence is dependent, limited, threatened; he is agitated
by needs, ideals, desires, fears; he is buffetted by loves and
hates, attractions and abhorrences, values and disvalues; he is

7. Quoted by Georg Siegmund in God On Trial (New York: Desclée Co., 1967),
. 257.

8. Ludwig Feuerbach, Tke Essence of Religion, p. 115, 117.

9. Karl Barth, Introductory Essay to Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of
Christianity, p. x.

10. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Philosophy of the Future, p. 41.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 99

forced to sift the good from the evil, all the time realizing from
distressing experience that he finds in himself unstableness
and weakness yet, at the same time, an attraction for noble
virtues and deeds. In his desire to stabilize the noble qualities
he finds in his nature, man hypostasizes, idolizes, absolutizes
them outside his own changeable being into an Absolute Other
who is unchangeable. This Other is endowed with wisdom, will,
justice, love, all the noble feelings and virtues which man him-
self experiences from time to time, both in himself and in his
fellowmen. Thus the absolutized attributes appear to man as if
they were the exclusive ornaments of another, an infinitely
more perfect being then himself. Spontaneously, religiously,
man projects and objectifies his own goodness and greatness in
the fantastic being he calls God. God is thus the product of pure
human imagination. Feuerbach writes:

God is for man the commonplace book where he registers
his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album
into which he enters the names of the things most dear
and sacred to him."!

In this way man simultaneously dispossesses himself and
enriches his God; in affirming God he denies himself; the poorer
he becomes, the richer his God becomes; nothing really exists
in God except what belongs and actually really still is in man’s
heart. Karl Barth records Feuerbach’s reaction to this process
of expoiliation:

Feuerbach honors those feelings and sacred things, but he
wants it understood that in the album there stands only
what first was in the heart of man. He only wants the
honest confession that the alleged mystery of religion is of
man; that man is dreaming when he imagines that a
Something Other, objectively confronting him, is that
ground, that Whence, that Necessity and that Law; is the
source from which his wishes and ideals flow and is the
sea of fulfillment toward which they tend. Man is dream-
ing instead of recognizing that it is his own being, his
desire and duty to live as man, which he, as a religious
man, quite rightly equates with God.!?

11. Ludwig Feuerbach, Tke Essence of Christianity, p. 132.
12. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introductory Essay by
Karl Barth, p. xvi.

30 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Who, then, and what really is the nature of this God? Feuer-
bach answers more comprehensively thus:

God as the epitome of all realities or perfections is nothing
other than a compendious summary devised for the be-
nefit of the limited individual, an epitome of the generic
human qualities distributed among men, in the self-reali-
zation of the species in the course of world history.”

Thus man strips himself and the human species of his high-
est attributes and creates with these virtues the essence of his
own God. Man must die that God may be born. As Spenlé so
aptly formulates what happens in this process of alienation,
“Religion is thus transformed into a vampire which feeds upon
the substance of mankind, its flesh and its blood.”!4

While tearing down the Absolute Spirit of Hegel, Feuerbach
remained Hegelian enough to accept this process of human
alienation as a justified process on the dialectical timetable of
man’s ascent to perfect self-consciousness. Religion as a prod-
uct of human alienation, God as the idol of man’s self-annihila-
tion were necessary phenomena if the human species were to
progress towards intenser, maturer self-realization. After all,
consciousness thrives on man’s ability to project himself, to
objectify himself and his species. Only in the milieu of duality
can man know himself, achieve his person in full—an action
reminiscent of the adage that one must lose oneself in order to
find oneself.

But eventually, in dialectical history, every antithesis must
rise to the synthesis; every rejection must move to a higher
reception; every alienation become a more perfect repos-
session. In his positive thesis, then, Feuerbach contends that
man has reached that point in his historical development
where he has to take back from religion and God that nature
which he had rejected in their favor. Feuerbach saw himself
as the prophet and the expediter of this process of reclama-
tion and the herald of the advent of the kingdom of man. He
set out to destroy the vampire of God, to dispel the phantom
of religion, to liberate man from the mighty myth of the

13. Ibid. p. xvi.
14. Jean-Edouard Spenlé La pensée allemande de Luther a Nietzsche, p. 122.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 31

Absolute Other, to restore man to man and hence to his
own greatness. He indicates that the principal aim of his
mission is to present mankind to the greatness of his own
essence and thereby to inspire men to have faith in their
humanity.

But the chief obstacle to man’s faith in himself and his own
greatness is the Christian God. It was necessary, therefore, to
dethrone the God of the Christian conscience, to dissolve the
religion of Christianity. For Feuerbach realized that God, as
the sum of the attributes which make up the greatness of man,
had never been more sublimely nor attractively created than in
the ineffable, Christian vision of the triune fellowship of divine
persons, each endlessly active on a special mission of love and
service to fallen humanity. Moreover, no other religion so con-
vincingly revealed the infinite contrast that existed between
this inacessible, hidden God of love and the abysmally impover-
ished, totally dependent, all-but-annihilated, wounded nature
of man, mired hopelessly as it was in an existence of suffering
and sin. For Feuerbach here was a classic case of corruptio
optimi pessima! Christianity was the sublimest, the religion of
religions, for it alone fully revealed the glory of God. Yet, para-
doxically, by the very fact that it. was the highest of religions,
Christianity was simultaneously the most pernicious of reli-
gions, for no other religious system ever succeeded so
thoroughly, in the very name of its perfect God, in extinguish-
ing so adequately the greatness of man in the fires of aliena-
tion.

Thus Feuerbach, speaking of the one, passionate aim of his
life and work—the mission to give man his due, to rescue him
from a God-ridden existence, to reveal to mankind its great
essence, its great value, its great. vocation in history—could
write in The Essence Of Christianity: “God was my first
thought, reason my second and man my third and last.”!5 Else-
where he insists that his intentions are positive, though his
method may be negative: “I deny only in order to affirm. I deny
the fantastic projection of theology and religion in order to
affirm the real essence of man.”!* “Certainly my work is nega-
tive, but, be it observed, only in relation to the inhuman, not to

15. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Religion.
16. Ibid, p. 4.

32 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the human elements in religion.” “While I do reduce theology
to anthropology, I exalt anthropology to theology; very much as
Christianity while lowering God into man, made man into
God.”

At the conclusion of his Heidelberg lectures delivered in 1848
and later published as The Essence of Religion, Feuerbach
crystallized the purpose of all his teaching thus: I aim to change
“the friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers,
worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into
students of this world, Christians, who on their own confession,
are half-animal and half-angel, into men—whole men.”!® Ear-
lier he had indicated this direction for his improvements when
he said that he would transform “theologians into anthropolo-
gians ... religious and political footmen of a celestial and
terrestrial monarchy and aristocracy into free, self-reliant citi-
zens of earth.””°

Here was an atheistic humanism that destroyed God as the
Absolute Other; yet simultaneously here was a theistic human-
ism that divinized man. “The divine essence is the glorified
human essence transfigured from the death of abstraction. In
religion man frees himself from the limitations of life; here he
throws off what oppresses, impedes or adversely affects him;
God is man’s self-awareness, emancipated from all actuality;
man feels himself free, happy, blessed only in his religion be-
cause here only does he live in his true genius; here he cele-
brates his Sunday.”?!

It must be observed that Feuerbach does not divinize individ-
ual man in his particularity, but he identifies God with the
essence of man, with humanity. His is a religion of Humanity,
the apotheosis of man though the apotheosis of mankind. In
this he differs from that other left-wing Hegelian, Max Stirner,
who rejected Feuerbach’s “essence of man” as being too ab-
stract, too ideal, too far from concrete reality. Stirner identified
God with the “unique individual.” Ego mihi deus! (l am my own
God!) Feuerbach, on the other hand, wrote: “It is the essence of
man that is the supreme being . . . If the divinity of nature is

17. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Christianity, p. 40.

18. Ibid, p. 43,

19. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Religion, p. 170.

20. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Religion, p. 14.
21. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Christianity, p. 173.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 33

the basis of all religions, including Christianity, the divinity of
man is its final aim . . . The turning point in history will be the
moment when man becomes aware that the only God of man
is man himself. Homo homini Deus?” He goes on to delineate
his altruistic humanism more in detail, thus: “Man spontane-
ously conceives of his own essence as individual in himself and
generic in God; as limited in himself and infinite in God.” But
when he finally sheds this mythical view and accepts personal
participation in his common humanity, man finally realizes the
divine dimension of his own being. In so doing he breaks the
bonds of auto-eroticism, goes forth in deeds of love to his fellow
men and establishes a community of love in the fellowship of
his own species. It is at such a time that he clearly sees and
experiences the truth that “the distinction between human and
divine is neither more nor less than the distinction between the
individual and mankind.”**

Does Feuerbach calmly accept the inevitable accusation that
his doctrine reduces him to the status of being an atheist? His
answer is quite forthright:

I have only found the key to the cipher of the Christian
religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of
contradictions and delusions called theology;—but in do-
ing so I have certainly committed sacrilege. If therefore
my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remem-
bered that atheism—at least in the sense in this work—is
the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed
on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or ac-
cording to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its es-
sence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity
of human nature.*4

Later on, somewhat sensitive about the charge of teaching
atheism, Feuerbach makes a distinction between the atheist
who denies God as a self-subsistent subject and the atheist who
denies the attributes of divinity as belonging exclusively to
mankind. The former, in Feuerbach’s mind, is not really an
atheist; the latter is the only true atheist.

22. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Christianity, p. 159.

23. Ibid.

24. Ludwig Feuerbach, Tke Essence Of Christianity, Author’s Preface, p.
XXXVI.

34 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God,
the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they
have held not to be God is God: namely, the attribute, the
quality, whatever has reality. Hence he alone is the true
atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being—for
example, love, wisdom, justice—are nothing; not he to
whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing.
And in no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily
also a negation of the predicates considered in themselves.
These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force
their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are
self-evident truths to him; they prove, they attest them-
selves. It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom
are chimaeras because the existence of God is a chimaera
... The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has
it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine: because
without it God would be a defective being... But if God as
subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate,
is the determining, then in truth the rank of the godhead
is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.”

It becomes a logical conclusion from the above that the man
who, like Feuerbach, denies the existence of the illusory sub-
ject God in favor of affirming the reality of the divine-human
attributes of love, wisdom, justice—this man comes to terms
with reality and chooses to make the object of his worship and
reverence not the chimerical God of the Christians, but the
essence of humanity. In doing this, such a man reveals, even as
Feuerbach before him, the secret splendor of humanity; he also
performs the first, essential act of true religion, embracing in
thought, love and deed the inexhaustible mysteries and good-
ness of human nature.

The most important thesis of all Feuerbach’s work and espe-
cially of The Essence Of Christianity is the positive one. It is
his view that the essential message of all religion and of the
Gospels of Christianity is that they are treating fundamentally
about man and human greatness under the myth-symbols of
God and supernaturalism. Using Hegel’s razor of negation in
the role of removing imaginary entia, Feuerbach reduces the
Christian God to his only possible realization in the conscious
progress of man and humanity. He reduces Christianity to the
religion of humanity. Under the action of this levelling blade,

25. Ibid., pp. 21-22.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 35

the whole countenance of Christianity is radically changed.

What is the meaning of the Incarnation of the Son of God?
God is a tear, an unutterable sigh in the depths of the human
heart; he is an altogether human being. The Incarnation is the
advent of a human being possessing human compassion for the
whole species. Christ is the consciousness of that species; we
are one in him; he is the unity of our consciousness, the focused
consciousness of our unity. Thus, whoever loves man for the
sake of man, whoever loves the human species for the sake of
the species, he is the universal, the adequate, the divine man;
he is the true Christian; he is Christ himself.26 Miracles are
merely the magical creations of a fervent fantasy which works
ceaselessly to satisfy the longings of the human heart.2”? The
Resurrection of Christ is “the fulfilled longing of man for an
immediate certainty of his continued personal existence after
death.”? All supernatural significance exists only in man’s
imagination and thus when man receives the sacrament of
Baptism, he merely receives the physical, curative, cleansing
power of natural water and of nature in general. As for partak-
ing of the Lord’s Supper, we have here the sublimest self-enjoy-
ment of human subjectivity. Men transform God into an
objective, external thing in order to subject him to themselves
as a repast of sensuous delight.?® The Word of God is actually .
—when it speaks what is true—the word of man; its divinity is
man’s divinity, the essence of man imparted to all men.” And
who is the Holy Spirit? Why, he is the “representation of the
religious sentiment to itself, the representation of the religious
emotion, enthusiasm; the personification of religion in religion.
The Holy Spirit is, therefore, the sighing creature, the longing
of the creature for God.”

And so it goes on and on. It is always the same negating
process under which these demythologizations of God and
Christianity are made. But Feuerbach protests that he has no
intention of being merely negative. He emphasises that in real-
ity, far from wishing to deprive man of his most.sacred truths,

26. Ibid, p. 388.
27. Ibid, p. 219.
28, Ibid., p. 220.
29. Ibid, p. 392.
30. Ibid, p. 153.
31. Ibid, p. 132.

36 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

he is really liberating him from inhibiting idols. The new
knowledge about God, religion and man actually frees man by
giving him the opportunity to grasp the full greatness he has
longed and fought for through thousands of years of violence
and bloodshed. Moreover, Feuerbach observes, for a long time
now it has been evident that theology, the Church and religion
have been denying God in favor of man. Ever since Luther the
interest in God has focused more on what God means for man
than on what God means in himself. Is it any wonder, then,
muses Feuerbach, justifying his demolition tactics against the-
ology, that theology has become anthropology? Christianity in
its theological form “has long ago disappeared not only from
reason but also from the life of humanity.” It is now a scandal-
ous fact that Christianity “is nothing more than a fixed idea
that stands in the most glaring contradiction to our fire and
life-insurance companies, our railroads and steam engines, our
picture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our
theatres and scientific museums.”*? Therefore, today “man is
the beginning, the middle and the end of religion.”**

We have briefly considered the atheistic humanism of Feuer-
bach. What strikes us forcefully is the completeness of his pro-
cess of reductionism. E. L. Mascall in his Secularization of
Christianity calls Feuerbach’s achievement “an even more he-
roic example” of reductionist theology than that accomplished
by Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel.” By merely interchanging
subject and predicate in any theological statement, theology is
transformed into anthropology, religious myth is dissolved and
the truth about man’s identity as God is revealed. The simplicity
of this truth-finding device is appealing and Feuerbach’s uni-
versal application of it in his reductionist ritual is quite ingeni-
ous. Yet whoever intelligently listens to Feuerbach’s new rule
for truth and alertly follows the creation of his full-blown hu-
manism will have to concur whole-heartedly in the judgment
passed upon it by Karl Barth: “We have heard Feuerbach. We
have heard something quite extraordinarily, almost nauseat-
ingly, trivial.”

32. Ibid., p. xliv.
33. Ibid., p. 282.
34. R. L. Mascall, Tke Secularization Of Christianity, footnote, p. 7.
35. Karl Barth, Introductory Essay to Essence Of Christianity, p. xix.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 37
Critique

Feuerbach was truly a child of his generation. To understand
his atheistic humanism, it will be important to see him within
his historical milieu. This should help us to come to an ap-
preciation of the currents of thought and spiritual effort that
flowed together in his pen and person. In the year 1842 Feuer-
bach published The Essence of Christianity. It was the very
year in which Auguste Comte completed the publication of his
voluminous Cours de philosophie positive. As de Lubac ob-
serves, “this coincidence of dates emphasises the convergence
of the two designs.” He goes on to record the perceptive remark
of a witness of these events. “Shortly afterwards, Emile Saisset
wrote: ‘Herr Feuerbach in Berlin like Monsieur Comte in Paris,
offers Christian Europe a new God to worship—the human
race,’ 736

Protestant theology in Feuerbach’s day contributed to the
rise of a self-sufficient, pretentious humanity. This self-glorifi-
cation had seized les philosophes of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, children of the French Revolution, who put
their faith in Reason, gave an impetus to profane learning and
developed a widespread spirit of skepticism and empiricism
hostile to Christianity. The ascent of humanity was in the air
and Feuerbach was happily perfumed with its sweet aroma.
Thus the religion of Reason apotheosized the mind of man as
his sole source of greatness and salvation. The concept, the
judgment, the philosophical treatise were the keys to self-mas-
tery, to God-mastery. With inspiration from nineteenth-cen-
tury Romanticism, whose emphasis was feeling, the heart, the
mystical, the religion of the human heart was said to deify
man; the human heart was now the sole locus of divine wisdom.
Scientism rejected God as an explanation of the cosmos; the
universe seemed to it self-sufficient, if not always self-explana-
tory. As man—his mind, his heart, his feeling, his freedom, his
science—increased, God decreased. Even the theologian, fol-
lowing Luther, overstressed religion as being the seeking of
God not in Himself and for Himself but rather the seeking of
God in man and for man. God was discovered not everywhere,
not in heaven, but solely on earth and in men. Some theologians

36. Henri de Lubac S. J., The Drama Of A Theist Humanism, p. 77.

38 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

went so far as to identify the Godhead with the humanity of
Jesus. Feuerbach found no difficulty in shifting this identity
from the humanity of the individual to the human species. The
climate of overweening self-assurance created the mentality
in Feuerbach to found a new religion whose dominant mark
would be humanistic and whose heaven would be this world.
Indeed, he admits, as Karl Barth recalls, that ‘“Schleier-
macher’s Berlin Church of the Trinity, remained holy ground
throughout his entire life. There he learned that man is not
only the measure of all things, but also the epitome, the origin
and end of all values—the view that gives justification and
assurance to human existence and its needs, wishes and
ideals.”37

Because he was nurtured on a theology that had long ne-
glected hope in favor of human self-reliance, Feuerbach was
blinded to the real, transcendent needs of man—his hunger for
a Transcendent God, a personal Saviour and Sanctifier who
could really justify men and restore them to moral wholeness,
who, though always transcendent, would yet always be present
to men. Feuerbach’s God was all too human and, as such, was
suspected by many of being the illusion of illusions. Nor could
Feuerbach justify his God on the grounds of his concern for
human greatness, for the human heart, for the emancipation of
man from slavery. These very same ideals have been incar-
nated in movements of messianic importance that have been
led by human devils, as history has so often demonstrated.

In fact, Feuerbach’s humanist atheism was immediately
pressed into service by his star pupil, Kar] Marx, as the founda-
tion for the erection of the monolith of communism. Purged of
abstraction and plunged into the social, economic alienation
that smoldered between capital and labor, Feuerbach’s cult of
“abstract man” became Marx’s “science of real men and their
historical development.” The halo of divinity was shifted from
the head of abstract man to the brow of the proletariat. Scien-
tific socialism became the new humanist religion. The new
alienation led to the negation of the negators, the unmasking
of the hidden powers who manipulated the impoverished
inasses, the expropriation of the expropriators. And foremost
among the expropriators, of course, was the Christian God who

37. Karl Barth, Introductory Essay to The Essence Of Christianity, p. xxviii.

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 39

was suspected and, some said was caught in the act of being, in
the words of Jean Lacroix, “an artifice which the rulers used in
the past to keep the majority in unending political adolescence,
and thus to prevent their reaching full development.”** God,
the Church, Christianity—along of course with property, the
State and all bourgeois institutions—were the monstrous
myths, the ideological, sociological, theological stumbling
blocks that had to be cleared from the path of man’s progress
to the realization of his own divinity. Thus Feuerbach’s human-
ism was transformed into the militant atheism of social democ-
racy. And of its vigorous program for saving the world Karl
Barth wrote: “Regarding all this, there were three principal
things to be attempted in the name of truth: rebellion, desertion
and war against the Church.”

Assessing Feuerbach’s thought, Copleston writes: “Feuer-
bach’s philosophy is certainly not outstanding. For example,
his attempt to dispose of theism by the account of the genesis
of the idea of God is superficial. But from the historical view-
point his philosophy possesses real significance . . .In particu-
lar, the philosophy of Feuerbach is a stage in the movement
which culminated in the dialectical materialism and the eco-
nomic theory of Marx and Engels.”*°

From the theological viewpoint, Feuerbach’s “theory is a
platitude,” says Karl Barth. Hans Ehrenberg pinpointed the
cause of its shallowness. Feuerbach, “true child of his century,
was a non-knower of death and a mis-knower of evil.” He
refused to address himself to the reality of death and misunder-
stood the nature of moral evil. His is the master illusion pre-
sented by the Arch-liar to man in the Garden of Eden: Man
experienced in good and evil is a better man, is like God, nay,
is God himself. The acceptance of this illusion is the foundation
of all tragedy in history, the foundation of all enslavement.
Faith in the creature—in the tempter’s word, in man’s self-
sufficiency—to the exclusion of faith in the true Word of God
is the root of the bankruptcy of Feuerbach’s atheistic human-
ism. Any edifice of thought or program of action founded on

38. Jean Lacroix, The Meaning Of Modern Atheism, p. 32.

39. Karl Barth, Introductory Essay to The Essence Of Christianity, p. xxvii.

40. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History Of Philosophy, Vol. 7, Part II, p. 67.

41. Karl Barth, Introductory Essay to The Essence Of Christianity, pp. xxvii-
xxviii.

40 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

this illusion is bound to become a form of rigid dogmatism and
cruel aggression inflicted upon humanity. And, of course,
Feuerbach’s is no exception. His edifice of thought is founded
on the myth of an abstract, non-personal, merely mentally ex-
isting humanity; he equates this non-being with God and calls
on all men to worship it; this is mental and religious chicanery.
Truth, religion, divinity are incarnated in persons—divine and
human individuals. Idolatry to the concept humanity results in
intellectual and religious suicide.

Probing into the psychological depths of Feuerbach’s flight
from transcendence, Karl Barth sees there a spirit of imperti-
nence that bespeaks the total absence of the light that comes
from the virtue of humility. This arrogance is spoken of not so
much with the intention of castigating it as a moral fault as to
spotlighting it as a tragic, self-inflicted posture leading to meta-
physical and theological blindness. For the sun of humility per-
forms a double function in the life of every man who opens
himself to receive its rays. First, it reveals the natural ground
upon which man stands in relation to all being and especially
to Transcendent Being. It makes brilliantly clear to man his
radical, ontological, existential condition before God, attract-
ing him to go out of himself with confidence and to accept the
Absolute Other with love and himself with gratitude, as a crea-
ture always related through total dependence upon God, for his
being and his life. Secondly, and even more importantly, on the
higher ground of revealed religion, the sun of humility floods
man with the truth of his radically tragic, existential posture
before a God who would save him, namely that he is always a
sinner destined to die, yet eternally related to the God-Man
through absolute dependence upon Him for the grace of salva-
tion. `

In conclusion, can it be honestly said that Feuerbach suc-
ceeded in attaining the goals of his work? He wanted to liberate
man from the degradation of enslavement to the tyranny of the
Absolute Other; he wanted to help man secure his own great-
ness in the fellowship of sharing the divinity and religion of
humanity. Actually what did he do to man and for man?

Inwardly, within the individual, he ċut the vision of man
down from its inexhaustibly fruitful speculations on the eter-
nal life and marvellous missions of the Blessed Trinity, down

Feuerbach: Humanity Becomes God 41

from its thrilling perusal of the supernatural elevation and
sublime destiny of glorified man, back to the limited, transi-
tory, confining conceptions of man the animal and worker.
Here is a myopic mind that has drained reality of its exalted
mysteries and thus inhibited and thwarted the infinite thrust of
the free intellect. Instead of increasing and broadening man’s
opportunities for intellectual inquiry into nature, supernature,
the transcendent and transitory purposes of human life, Feuer-
bach enprisons the mind of man in the repressive, occult, irra-
tional mysteries of an anti-Christian religion of humanism.
Whereas Christ demonstrated in His teaching and life that the
truth would make men free, history has demonstrated that the
myths of Feuerbach make men slaves.

We have in Feuerbach the expression of an inordinate itch to
contract the inexhaustible plenitude of transcendent Being
into a kind of cosmic, social solipsism. History is a cruel, incor-
ruptible witness to the crimes atheistic humanism has perpe-
trated against human beings. Its. theological “reductio ad
humanum,” sprung from a hateful negation has, delivered
many nations and over a billion souls in a span of fifty years
into slavery at the hands of a Party of inhuman dogmatists, and
their totalitarian States, in a living tomb of universally deaden-
ing moral, intellectual and political conformism. Atheism is
always a movement from freedom to servitude; it always pro-
duces the excess of tyranny. If the individual enthrones him-
self against God, he simultaneously isolates himself in the
prison of egoism and the sterile desert of auto-eroticism. When
atheism takes the form of a social conspiracy to dethrone God,
it takes as its communal mission the messianic goal of secula-
rizing every cell of society until the whole body is militantly
atheistic. And, in the words of de Lubac, this community in
cosmic captivity, animated with the Feuerbachian animus
against God and Christianity, “takes its outward course in dis-
order, begets tyrannies and collective crimes, and finds its ex-
pression in blood, fire and ruin.’42

42. Henri de Lubac, S.J., Tke Drama Of Atheist Humanism, p. 7.

CHAPTER II

pa
ié

Nietzsche:
God Becomes Superman

THE VIOLENT HATRED BEHIND NIETZSCHE’S ATTACK
upon God, specifically the Christian God, rages from his resent-
ment against that God’s malignant effect upon man. The God
of the Christians is convicted for creating out of man a commu-
nity of intellectual and moral cretins. We read in Antichrist:

The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick,
God as a spider, God as a spirit—is one of the most corrupt
conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may
even represent the low-water mark in the descending de-
velopment of divine types. God degenerated into the con-
tradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and
eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life,
against nature, against the will to live! God—the formula
for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about
the “beyond!” God—the deification of nothingness, the will
to nothingness pronounced holy!?

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Antichrist, translated by Walter Kaufmann, in
The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press), pp. 585-586.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 43

In his crusade to develop an elite of supermen, Nietzsche
proclaimed the “death of God,” not merely the God of the meta-
physicians but of the theologians as well. And he opposed this
God with an absolute, shouting No! A No that became more
savage and frantic the closer he approached his collapse into
madness. Co-heir of an atheism that was taken for granted as
already scientifically proven, Nietzsche, like Feuerbach,
Comte, Marx and a host of other fiz de siècle intellectuals, took
no pains to refute God philosophically. God and Christianity
were simply passé and done with. There was no longer any need
for a theoretical attack on what was annihilated. Moreover,
Christianity itself was iz articulo mortis, its scriptural fables
faded, its dogmas drained of divinity, its philosophy discred-
ited, its sacraments unmasked as efficient power symbols in the
sacerdotal subjection of every phase of man’s life.

But Christianity dies hard. It has been under assault for two
thousand years. Wave after wave of heresy has been shattered
against its rock of truth; sword after sword of oppression has
been snapped against the breastplate of its fidelity. Yet it al-
ways survived the ravages of time—political intrigues, reli-
gious wars, schisms, internal corruptions, the treason of the
intellectuals, the plots of under and over worlds. Nevertheless,
in modern times, as Nietzsche read them, Christians them-
selves had finally tired of their theological mythology; they no
longer believed in God. They were in the process of discarding
Him for being irrelevant in an age of enlightenment, unneces-
sary in the new centuries of science, embarrassing in a time of
psychological maturity, old in an era of modernity, cruel to-
ward the gentle generations of fresh humanists, rigid in the
face of evolutionary progress and politically implicated
against the liberation of the masses. Nietzsche’s madman
shouted to the whole world the treason against their God and
Church which the Christians were trying to ignore. Leaping
into the midst of a crowd in the market place and transfixing
his astonished listeners with piercing glances, he cried: “God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we,
the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?’?

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Joyful Wisdom), trans. by Walter
Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1967), p.
95.

44 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

But the counterfeit.Christians had devised a way to comfort
themselves. They insulated themselves from the tragedies of
life behind the last bastion of Christianity. They defended
themselves behind the rampart of Christian moral standards.
They naively strove to maintain the practice of Christian mor-
als, without their theological foundations, They deluded them-
selves into thinking that secularized forms of Christianity,
such as democracy, socialism, welfarism, which had severed
their lifelines with the Christian faith, could manage to pros-
per on their own. Nietzsche saw the futility of this subterfuge.
If there was one reality this supreme skeptic never doubted, it
was that “the murder of an absolute God” inevitably demanded
the rejection of that God’s set of absolute moral values. He
knew that Christian conduct was not possible for any length of
time without the underpinning of Christian convictions. And so
if the time for metaphysical attacks against God and Christian-
ity was past, the time for the technique of psychological analy-
sis and the tactics of corrosive ridicule had arrived. Nietzsche
moved in for the kill against a Christianity tottering on rotted
foundations. Where hatred and violence had failed to bring
down Christianity, mockery and laughter would succeed. Deri-
sion would now be the test for its truth and integrity. And Nietz-
sche was convinced that its farcical facade of objective ethics
would crumble under the test of his acidulous cynicism. The
tactic was simple. All one had to do was to demonstrate that
Christian morals were a monstrous swindle against humanity,
a capital crime against life. Aghast at the ferocity of this at-
tack, Karl Jaspers wrote that “Nietzsche became the new foun-
tainhead of anti-Christianity, which had perhaps never before
been so radical and so aware of its ultimate implications.”?

Nietzsche’s family background was strongly Christian. He
was born into a family of Lutheran clergymen. His father and
both grandfathers were Lutheran ministers. As a youth Nietz-
sche was deeply religious and one must not be fooled by his own
later, manic-depressive falsifications of this side of his nature.
In Ecce Homo, where he gives a sarcastically pungent review
of his life and works, we read: “Atheism is not for me the
consequence of something else; still less is it a thing which has

3. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche And Christianity, translated by E.B., Ashton `
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, Gateway Edition, 1961), p. 1.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 45

befallen men; in my case it is, something that goes without
saying, a matter of instinct.”* Karl Jaspers seems to have been
put off by this exaggeration, for he writes: “Christian contents,
literal Christian teaching, Christian authority lacked real
meaning for him. He had nothing to shake off later, not even a
childish attachment to myths.”* However, Nietzsche’s early au-
tobiographical notes written when he was nineteen reveal his
deep religious faith. It is true that even then he was often
painfully locked in a tormenting struggle with the Angel of
Doubt. The boy was already agonizing over the problem
“whether a mirage had not led mankind astray for two thou-
sand years.” Again, as a young prophet, he was predicting that
“great upheavals are still in the offing, once the masses will
have grasped that all Christianity rests on exceptions. The exis-
tence of God, immortality, biblical authority, inspiration —
these will always remain problematical. I have tried to deny
everything: Oh, tearing down is easy, but building up!”

In one deeply moving passage, however, the youthful Nietz-
sche seems to have banished the tempting angel and regained
religious peace. He wrote: r

I have already experienced many things, joy as well as
sadness, lightness of heart as well as depression, but in all
these things God has certainly led me as a father might
lead his helpless little child. He has already imposed much
suffering on me, but in all this I recognize with reverence
His majestic power which has everything turn out for the
best. I have firmly resolved to devote myself to His service
forever. May the dear Lord give me the power and strength
I need for this resolution. And may He protect me on my
way through life. As a child I trust in His grace. He will

` protect us all so that no evil will befall us. But may His
holy will be done! I will accept with joy whatever He sends
me, whether happiness or unhappiness, whether poverty
or riches. And J will boldly look death itself in the eye.
Death will one day unite us all in eternal joy and blessed-
ness. Yes, dear Lord, let the light of your countenance
shine upon us forever! Amen!*

4. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. II, p. 1.

5. Jaspers, op. cit, p. 9.

6. Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bande, edited by Carl Hauser (Munich: Hauser
Verlag, 1956), Vol. 3, pp. 7-155.

46 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

But, as he does to all men, the Angel of Darkness returned to
buffet the soul of Nietzsche, seeing in this young genius what
his mentor, Professor Ritschl, saw, a “future frontrank German
philosopher” who would shake the world with his brilliance. In
a famous youthful poem, “To An Unknown God,” we can wit-
ness Nietzsche attempting to decide his future. He is at the
crossroads of life. Will he give himself to God or will he break
forever with Him? The poem reveals the weakening faith of
Nietzsche and his mysterious fascination for revolt against
God. The decision to break away is all but taken, yet the poem
reveals a deep religious nostalgia to remain with God:

Once more before I go my way,
Before I fix my gaze ahead,

I lift my trembling hands to thee

To whom in solitude I pray.

To thee in my heart’s depth

Sacred altars reverently

I consecrate,

Imploring that thy voice should keep
Summoning me; altars whereon

The words glow: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.
His I am, though to this hour

I trot with the apostates’ throng.

I am his! I feel his net,

Still fight its closing in on me;

Were I to flee,

I would return to serve him yet.

I will to know thee, unknown one!
Thou deep into my soul reaching,
Storm swift through my life sweeping,
Unknowable, like-to-me one,

I would know, Lord, I would serve theef

In a letter to his sister Elisabeth on June 11, 1865, from Bonn,
where he was attending the university, Nietzsche revealed he
could no longer imitate her fidelity to the Christian faith. He
had decided against God because faith in God left people effete
with a “feeling of greatest smugness.” As for himself, he longs
for the virile thrills and dangers of “striking out on new paths
in conflict with custom” where one is “uncertain of one’s step

7. Nietzsche, Gedichte, (Leipzig: Insel Verley, n.d.) See also the Translation
by Elinor Gastendyle Briefs in God on Trial by Georg Siegmund, p. 285-286.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 47

when walking independently, shifting one’s moods frequently,
indeed, one’s conscience, lacking often all comfort but always
having the eternal goal of the True, the Beautiful and the Good
in view ... Should you long for peace of soul and happiness?
Then by all means believe. Should you want to become a dis-
ciple of truth? Then search.”*

Thus, in the cause of the perilous adventure for truth, Nietz-
sche abandons the Christian God. What is more, with Spartan
discipline and barbaric ferocity, he mounts an offensive which
culminates in a crusade against God. This Godless Crusade
proclaims that God is dead and that man, that is Superman, is
the New God who dwells on earth. Secondly, the Godless Move-
ment proclaims that the New God Superman is immanentized
in time, preparing for man a heaven here, not one in the non-
existent hereafter. The hereafter is really the here; the tran-
scendent is nothing more than the immanent; God is really
man, albeit. elite man, Superman.

Perhaps one of Nietzsche’s greatest contributions to
humanity is his psychological and historical critique of the
creative impotency and even degeneracy of his own genera-
tion, which unabashedly characterized itself as an “age of
decadence.” His appalling picture of its sterile positivism, bour-
geois, hypocritical orthodoxy, trivial certainties, pedantic pre-
tentions was begun in his first major work, The Birth Of
Tragedy. With aroused ire he opens here his mission to per-
suade his generation to take itself seriously and to conclude
courageously to the consequences of its basic assumptions.
These qualities of honesty and fearlessness are splendid adorn-
ments of Nietzsche’s work.

The major theme of The Birth Of Tragedy, worked out
through a fantastic and now famous symbolism, deplores the
decline of culture in the modern world. Nietzsche was nau-
seated by an educational system that had replaced cultural
vitality with dull informational accretions; he despised the
play-acting used to cover up the loss of spiritual substance,
man’s way of living “as if;” he fled the thickening boredom that
enveloped a society of uninhibited sensations where everyone
talked, no one listened and all moved with insatiable curiosity

8. Nietzsche, Unpublished Letters, translated by Kurt F. Leidecker (London:
Peter Owen, Ltd., 1960), pp. 33-34.

48 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

behind masks of duplicity. “Art,” wrote the author, “owes its
continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality, even
as propagation of the species depends on the duality of the
sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconcilia-
tion.”® Handsome Apollo, the god of plastic arts, symbolizes the
creative luminosity and order of being; his highest achieve-
ment is breathing forms of Titan heroes into chaos. Dionysos,
the god of music and bacchanalian delirium, symbolizes uni-
versal, unharnessed energy whose invisible surge constructs
and destroys universes. From the stormy communion of these
Olympian parents, Attic tragedy was born, the apex of human
cultural achievement, an offspring whose marvelous features
blend the serenity of Apollo with the enthusiasm of Dionysos.
But artistic beauty has its fearful price and the Greeks will-
ingly paid it. Their creation of beauty grew out of their fearless-
ness in facing the terrors and horrors of existence. Triumph
over suffering, conflict, sickness, fate produces beauty. A race
so hypersensitive, so emotionally intense, so sensitized to suf-
fering could only live by developing the tragedies of the Titans
into “the shining fantasy of the Olympians.” And the work ends
on the admiring cry of the author: “What suffering must this
race have endured in order to achieve such beauty!”!®

But along came notorious Euripides who devalued tragedy to
comedy, reducing the Titan protagonists to common-herd pyg-
mies and throwing the stage open to the stampede of the spec-
tators. But though the vulgarizing dramatist was Euripides, the
daemon who drove him and formed his message was the agita-
tor Socrates. Greek culture succumbed because Socrates sup-
planted Apollo in his conflict with Dionysos and submerged
Dionysos himself under the tide of his rationalistic dialectic.
Rationalist fever consumes myths and mysteries and, with
these obliterated, renders civilization rootless. Since Socrates’
advent generation after generation has substituted theoretical
for tragic, rationalist for aesthetic man. The substitute is a
pallid fraud of the Greek ideal. Rationalism saps the beautiful
by reducing it to the sensible, subjecting it to “the mechanism
of concepts, judgments and syllogisms” and calling the end

9, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Francis Golffing
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1956), p. 19.
10. fbid., p. 146.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 49

product man’s masterpiece.!! And the truth is, as Nietzsche
insists, that “only as an aesthetic product can the world be
justified to all eternity.”!?

But modern society is sick with Socratism and scientific opti-
mism. Its scientism demands an aristocracy of learned ped-
ants. Yet its leveling optimism prepares the barbaric masses
for a revolt that will avenge the injustices of the centuries. If
men are to cure the blight that already corrodes their culture,
Dionysos must be chosen over Socrates. With Socrates ban-
ished, there will be a rebirth of tragedy. Nietzsche himself will
be the precursor of this renaissance. He appeals to his friends
to abandon the learned of the day; they are merely the “precur-
sors of senility.” If they join him in preparing for the second
coming of Dionysos, the new artists will experience trium-
phant joy while participating in the rejuvenation of tragedy
and the “fire-magic,” Dionysiac music. But they must be strong
in their faith and steeled for hardship. In the end, the wand of
Dionysos will recreate the cultural wasteland of their era by
means of a whirlwind that cleanses the land of waste and ren-
ders it lush with the golden glow and verdant richness of new
life. Only let them grasp the thyrsus in hand and follow
Dionysos and his herald, prepared for a struggle that will even-
tuate in miracles.

When he finished The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche did not yet
see explicitly that he and his Dionysos, his tragic ideal, would
encounter on their return to the struggle for men’s souls not
Socrates, the irreconcilable Rationalist, but Christ, the uncon-
querable Redeemer. De Lubac, posing the question, “Did Nietz-
sche see at this time his tragic, Dionysiac ideal as the merciless
antagonist to Christianity?” answers the question thus: “At the
time of The Birth of Tragedy, he did not yet see in Dionysos—
as he did later in The Will To Power and Ecce Homo—the
symbol of a pagan type of religion to be set up against Christ.
His way of looking at things was not primarily anti-Christian
at that time. It was anti-Socratic.”"* There is, however, in the
historico-psychological mechanism of critique in this work an
explanation pregnant with the embryo that will one day ma-

11. Ibid., p. 94.
12. Ibid., p. 42.
13. Henri Lubac, S.J., op. cit, p. 39.

50 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ture into a violent transvaluation of all Christian values into
the values of a new and godless paganism. It reads:

It is the sure sign of the death of a religion when its mythic
presuppositions become systematized, under the severe,
rational eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a ready sum
of historical events, and when people begin timidly de-
fending the veracity of myth but at the same time resist
its natural continuance—when the feeling for myth with-
ers and its place is taken by a religion claiming historical
foundations."

Attack on the Christian Ideal

In The Gay Science (Joyful Wisdom), Nietzsche proclaimed
“God is dead!” But his listeners, apathetic in an age of bourgeois
complacency, were struck speechless with incomprehension,
evidently totally unaware of the event. “I come tco early,” cries
Nietzsche’s mad herald, dashing his lantern to pieces upon the
pavement. “This tremendous event is still on its way... it has
not yet reached the ears of man... the light of stars requires
time, deeds require time even after they are done.”’® The
“dreadful news” will take hold of minds in about two centuries
and, when it does, men will be lost in giddiness and the weight-
lessness of all things.

Yet for “free spirits” and philosophers the demise of God
should not be a cause of sorrow. Rather it should be the occasion
for happiness, relief, exhilaration, dawn. The root of cheerful-
ness for such elite souls will be “that the Christian God has
ceased to be believable . . . that the ‘old god is dead.’” How can
the death of such a divine Person be the cause of rejoicing?
Very simple, argues Nietzsche. Questioners and thinkers no
longer have to put up with God as “the rough-fisted answer”
and indelicate obstacle to the adventures of their minds. Dawn
has at last broken on an infinitely free, if hazy, horizon. Grati-
tude, amazement, anticipation, independence should swell our
hearts. Now our world may be completely reevaluated ad majo-
rem hominis gloriam. Man’s ships may now venture forth un-
fettered, seek danger anywhere. Now is he challenged to work

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 68.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Gay Science, p. 96.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 51

his wonderful will to surpass himself. With God gone, the sea,
our sea, Was never more open, never more alluring, never more
demanding.’*

In other words, the demise of God and the dissolution of faith
in Him has promoted man to the overlordship of the universe.
Man’s creative energies are now released to develop them-
selves to their unimaginable fuliness. The Christian God, who
had set limits to man’s greatness, could now no longer shackle
the thrust of his genius with commands and prohibitions. Man
now needed no longer to sigh for an unreal, supernatural world
in the great beyond; his soaring, wings unclipped, was to be
done in time; his high adventure was not sainthood, but super-
humanity. At last, two thousand years of frustrating nature are
ended forever. In modern times it is essential for man to be an
atheist.

How had humanity been so successfully doomed to degrada-
tion during the past twenty centuries? Nietzsche accused
Christianity of destroying all the truth by which men had lived
in pagan, classical times. Tragic truth, as understood and lived
before Socrates, was undermined by Christian mythology. To
be sure, Antiquity is convicted of the most monstrous crime
against mankind in that it prepared the way for the conquest
of Christianity. Socrates and Plato, founders of an anti-pagan-
ism—a sort of pre-existing Christianity with its God of absolute
Beauty and Morality—prepared the ground for the advent of
Christianity. With the work of its vanguard accomplices done
so well, Christianity moved in to counter pagan truth with its
own fiction. Such myths as a Triune God, moral world-order,
sin, grace, redemption, immortality, resurrection, hell, heaven
thoroughly destroyed the appeal of paganism for the masses.
How could Christianity have ever duped so many ages of the
learned and especially the modern age which is proud of its
historical prowess?

Christianity developed an especially effective technique for
proclaiming and spreading its doctrine and morals. Its principle
of policy was “not whether a thing is true, but how it will serve.”
Its lack of intellectual integrity permitted resorting to any lie
and manipulating the emotional thermostat of men until it
reached the temperature of belief. It produced a veritable arse-

16. Ibid., p. 448.

52 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

nal, educational arsenal, of the means for seduction to faith.
The spirit that motivated the use of these means was the cal-
culated denigration of its enemies or possible sources of opposi-
tion. It debased reason, philosophy, science, methodical doubt,
even prudent caution. On the other hand, it heaped triumphant
praise on all its doctrines and morals, referring them to the
Creator as their source and to the Redeemer as their Promulga-
tor, foreclosing thereby any criticism or reassessment of them
and demanding, as the sole spiritual posture before its creed,
acceptance of the whole with profound gratitude and humility.
Christianity shrewdly nurtured the resentments of the hero-
masses against the honors of the mighty; she attracted outcasts
and failures of every sort by persuading them they were the
equal before God and the Redeemer of any other man. Such
doctrines swelled the weak, the ignorant, the foolish into fanat-
ical folly so that they imagined themselves the light of the
world and the salt of the earth. There was the magnetic power.
of paradox in her doctrine—life through death, honor through
humiliation, mastery through slavery, power through impo-
tence, ascendence through descent. The doctrine perplexed,
outraged, incited to abuse and persecution. And wonder of won-
ders, it attracted the noble and strong as well as the lowly and
ignoble. Nietzsche especially resented Christianity’s power
over the noble, whom he wanted to enlist in his elite of super-
men for the remaking of humanity. Thus he invidiously assigns
Christianity’s success with the noble to its appeal to every cow-
ardice and vanity of their fatigued souls as well as to their trust,
guilelessness, forbearance, patience, resignation, neighborly
love, submission to God. Christianity caught the noble in its
nets when they were exhausted, unharnessed and in moods of
depressing abdication of their entire selves.

What was humanity fighting in Christianity? A movement
that aimed at conquering the strong, discouraging the noble,
exploiting the miseries of men, eroding their self-assurance,
poisoning their natural instincts, rendering them sick, weak
until their will to power is reversed and turned against them—
until they perish from the excesses of self-abasement, self-
affliction, disintegrating in that most pitiable deformity whose
most famous victim is the brilliant genius Pascal.”

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, translated by Walter Kaufman in
The Portable Nietzsche, p. 572.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 53

Christianity, its doctrine and morals are founded on an his-
torical distortion. And Nietzsche develops the following cohe-
sive (in his mind) story of how Christianity was born and
progressed. Christianity, using as its origin “the crude fable of
the miracle worker and Redeemer,” managed to hoodwink the
world about the historical truth of its beginnings. Actually,
Christianity began with the event of Jesus’ death on the cross;
it does not have roots in His life or teachings or any of His
actions preceding His crucifixion. We have in Christianity the
history of a subterfuge and misunderstanding that grew cruder
as time went on. The original symbolism of Christianity devel-
oped through its swallowing up of the doctrines and rites of all
the subterranean cults of the Roman empire as well as the
nonsense of all kinds of diseased reason. Christianity’s destiny
lay in the necessity that its faith had to become as diseased, as
base and vulgar, as the needs it was meant to satisfy were
diseased, base and vulgar.!®

Thus, a grand hoax from the beginning, Christianity was not
founded as a way of life by Christ. “There was only one Chris-
tian and he died on the cross.”!° Jesus had nothing consciously
to do with the founding of Christianity as a creed or commu-
nity. Although he made a sharp distinction between the mes-
sage of Jesus and the creed of Christianity, Nietzsche rejected
both with contempt. He is against Jesus whose truthfulness,
nevertheless, he defends. He is against the Apostles, the
Church, the Fathers and all priests whose deception and dis-
honesty he abhors and condemns. Moreover, he is against both
Jesus and Christianity because both advocate a type of life that
reeks with the symptoms of decadence. With total antagonism
against Christ and Christianity understood, we can proceed to
relate Nietzsche’s history of the lie of Christianity:

Jesus did not. bring a new knowledge or a new faith; He
merely achieved in Himself a new way of life. He transformed
His individual life by evoking “a profound instinct for the way
one must live so as to feel in heaven, to feel eternal.” The
heavenly bliss Jesus experienced was His “psychological real-
ity of redemption.” But all that is meant when one says that
Jesus achieved beatitude is that He felt “at home in a world no
longer touched by reality, in an inner world.” Jesus’ message

18. Ibid., p. 610.
19. Ibid., p. 612.

54 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

when He used the words light or life referred merely to this
inner world. Parables, words, nature, everything, all reality are
merely symbols of His inner world. Jesus was, thus, an anti-
realist. Hence none of His words must be taken literally, for He
could have no doctrine, no faith to formulate, nor morality to
hand down to His disciples. He was neither a conscious nor
unconscious founder of a religion.

But how did Jesus manifest His inner realization of true,
eternal life in His outward words and actions? His good tidings
consisted in erasing all contrasts, all distinctions. Nietzsche
has Jesus speak as if the objective world of sensation and per-
ception were non-existent to him because this world was full of
contrasts, definiteness, distinctions. Jesus calls on the blessed
to pass the world by, to go through it without interest. Here,
then, is a Jesus who is non-resistance personified; He denies
nothing, affirms everything, excludes nothing, no one from His
love. Natives, strangers, Jews, non-Jews, enemies, friends, rela-
tives—all are non-selectively loved and never depreciated.
Therefore, no one is to be resisted; neither the heretic nor the
persecutor, the tormentor nor the aggressor. Courts of law are
to be shunned for no one ought to take an oath. If this conduct
represents the inner life of Jesus, then Jesus is the acme of pure
simplicity, untouched by history, culture, politics, war, good or
evil. And, in fact, Nietzsche says that with no more contrasts
existing for Jesus, there no longer existed for Him the concepts
of sin, guilt, punishment, estrangement between God and
man. Indeed, time, physical life, crises of any manner, even
death itself have no reality for Jesus. They are all part of an
absent, quite different world from the inner bliss of the life
of Jesus.

To be sure, Jesus sealed His blissful life in His inner world by
dying on the cross in the world of reality. “This bringer of glad
tidings died as he had lived—not to redeem mankind, but to
show one how to live.”®° Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold
responsiblity, not even to resist the evil one, but to love him
also.

Now what manner of man could live such a life as is here
depicted? Nietzsche says that here is a man who loathes reality,
who was insensible to suffering in the real world, who aban-

20. bid., pp. 608-609.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 55

doned all resistance and fell back on love as the only way of life.
Nietzsche finds in such a person “the moving charm of quite a
mixture of the sublime, the sick, the childlike.”2! But the two
most inappropriate concepts possible in the explanation of the
Jesus type were misused by Renan when he called Jesus a
genius and a hero. Nietzsche laughs this explanation to scorn.
For him, Jesus is the exact opposite of these grand concepts.
The apt term to be applied to Jesus would be the title idiot, in
the sense in which Dostoevsky called his Prince Myshkin an
idiot.??

But Nietzsche tells us that the perfections he found in the
personality and life of Jesus actually belong to the category of
decadence. To be sure, Jesus was a shining example of honesty
itself, but He advocated a life “just the opposite of all wrestling,
of all feeling-oneself-in-a-struggle.” Such a physiological habit
of shrinking from any contact with the concrete world repre-
sents an instinctive hatred of every reality, a flight into the
untouchable, the incomprehensible, beyond time and space.
Did not Jesus’ way of living instinctively arouse the mighty to
destroy Him? Did not the unnatural and sick world into which
Jesus led His followers breed His own executioners? “This
bringer of glad tidings” makes everyone a child of God and, as
such, the equal of everyone else. But a man’s worth, according
to Nietzsche, is measured by the power of his will, by how
wholeheartedly he will endure pain and torture and turn them
to his own advantage. Without doubt, Jesus was a paragon of
endurance, the soul of serenity. But He lacked self-control in
Nietzsche’s meaning of the term. There was nothing to be con-
trolled in the life of Jesus. Was He not indifferent to all per-
sonal advantages and disadvantages? He was “blessed in peace,
in gentleness, in not being able to be inimical.”** “He died too
early; he himself would have recanted his teaching, had he
reached my age. Noble enough was he to recant.”24

21. Ibid., p. 603.

22. In Dostoevsky’s /diot, Prince Myshkin, embodied the Christ-like ideal.
Loving, forgiving, utterly self-effacing, he both crushingly testified against
current moral depravity and sparked criminal reprisals that drove him back to
idiocy. Nietzsche loved Dostoevsky the psychologist, shunned him as ardent
Christian. He saw the idiot Christian as the acme of decadence.

23. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, pp. 600-601.

24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Walter
Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 185.

56 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Nietzsche was aware that his picture of Jesus was open to
serious doubt and questioning. The Gospels give a quite differ-
ent portrait of Jesus as Redeemer. Nietzsche admits that there
exists “a gaping contradiction between the sermonizer on the
mount, lake and meadow, whose appearance seems like that of
a Buddha on soil that is not at all Indian, and that fanatic of
aggression, that mortal enemy of theologians and priests,”2>
Despite this radical contrast, Nietzsche insists that the peace-
ful Jesus of the mount and meadows is the genuine Jesus. The
judging Jesus is the creation of his followers, a false interpreta-
tion by the primitive Christian community, striving desper-
ately to survive in a hostile pagan world. “I myself have no
doubt that the generous dose of gall (and even of esprit) first
flowed into the type of the Master from the excited state of
Christian propaganda; after all, the unscrupulousness of all
sectarians, when it comes to constructing their own apology
out of their master, is only too well known.”2¢

Apparently in order to survive, the small Christian commu-
nity, far from forgiving their enemies for killing their master,
revived the feeling of resentment which their Master had repu-
diated by His death. They predicted that the kingdom of God
would come as a judgment over the murderers of their Master.
And Jesus Himself as “a judging, quarreling, angry, malig-
nantly sophistical theologian” would continue to oppose His
mighty enemies, the Scribes and Pharisees, and eventually con-
quer the all-powerful enemy, the Roman empire. Thus the
fanatic and the militant was introduced into Jesus, the great,
peaceful symbolist. Christianity completely distorted both the
personality of Jesus and what He accepted as truth. Using Jesus
the Judge as their instrument to press forth their own truth and
mission, the Apostles appealed to the masses at the bottom of
society, to outcasts and sinners. Christianity has been a false
conspiracy from its inception; the whole New Testament is the
book of distortions with which the world was to be trapped. The
life of Jesus was first reduced to the screen of a faith; all seri-
ously minded followers were bound absolutely to accept every
article of this faith. A legend of salvation now replaced all of
Jesus’ symbols, parables. Formulae, rites, dogmas, a special

25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Antichrist, p. 604.
26. Ibid., p. 614.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 57

history were universally imposed and substituted for the sym-
bolic way in which Jesus lived. Out of the withdrawn, narrow,
wholly unworldly life of Jesus, the apostles “fabricated” a
world history, a personal immortality, a kingdom of God here,
present, militant and yet to come up to glory in a kingdom of
heaven in the beyond. They forged a personal Savior, Son of
God, the second person of the Trinity who founded this small
community for all times and for all eternity on Peter the Rock.
“Al this is cynicism, unmatched in history, a mockery of sym-
bol.” “In the Christian world of ideas there is nothing that has
the least contact with reality—and it is in the instinctive hatred
of reality that we have recognized the only motivating force at
the root of Christianity.”?*

Who among that little flock could have had the genius to
think up such a successful swindle? It was the genius Paul.
With rabbinical fire and impudence, he created the battle cry
that moved the millions. It was obscene; it was contemptible,
but it was eminently successful, for it offered a challenge and
promised a reward. “If Christ is not risen from the dead, then
our faith is vain.” Paul, the greatest fabricator among the
Christians, produced the “malignant counterfeit” of a savior
figure in whom death and resurrection were the supreme reali-
ties.

What of the progress of Christianity after Paul and the Apos-
tles had left the earthly scene? It had certainly spread like
wildfire even up to modern times. Nietzsche attributes this
phenomenal conquest of souls by the Christian movement to its
original falsification of moral values. He explains this re-
evaluation of values from an historical and a psychological
aspect:

Historically, the Jews were a brilliant but violently oppressed
people. They shrewdly realized that to survive with some kind
of decent existence against the powerful and great nations that
surrounded and often enveloped them, they had to attack the
values of the mighty in some subtle way. Keeping their raging
hatred and vindictiveness deeply hidden within their souls, this
priestly people, with frightening consistence, inverted the aris-
tocratic value equation—“good/noble/powerful/beautiful/-

27. Ibid, p. 608.
28. Ibid, p. 613.

58 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

happy/favored-of-the-gods, maintaining ... that only the poor,
the powerless are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly truly
blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to
all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and
thus the cursed and damned! We know who has fallen heir
to this Jewish inversion of values . . .”®° Christianity took up
this technique of its parent religion. It appealed to the furi-
ous hatred and resentment felt by the millions of slaves, mis-
fits and mediocre against the mighty. Looking deeper into
the psychology of this shrewd ruse in human relations,
Nietzsche claims that the resentment, the frustration of impo-
tence drew the herd to Christianity by a very hidden attrac-
tion. What was happening was that the will to power, strug-
gling even in impotence, created new evaluating ideals and
moral interpretations. The masses, driven on by a fanat-
ical hunger for justice, by their secret rancor against their
overlords, by a madness to somehow control their rulers,
saw in Christian spirituality, backed up by its dogmas, the
perfect means for undermining the high, noble and strong.
They said No to everything representing ascending power
in life.

Christianity has conquered for twenty centuries because it
has collected, organized, taught and disciplined the vast,
numerically superior dregs of society against the few mighty.
With a resiliency that is astonishing, it has adapted the myster-
ies, salvational aspirations, modes of sacrifice, asceticisms,
rituals, philosophies, accusations against worldliness culled
from paganism and Judaism to the needs of its faithful. In
outbidding its competitors, it has brazenly stolen their brightest
treasures, added her own creations and driven many religions
from the market for souls. Nietzsche taught that “not Jesus but
Christianity” is the fulfillment of Judaism. Christianity inher-
ited Judaism’s art of lying in the cause of holy survival and
raised this art to consummate perfection in her New Testa-
ment. Omnipotent Yaweh, a promised land, a priesthood of
sacrifice, a morality of sin and punishment were excellent Jew-
ish fabrications. But they did not compare with the Christian
creations of Trinity, God-Man, Pope, heaven, hell. In a sum-

29, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis
Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1956), p. 167.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 59

mary account of what Christianity accomplished, Nietzsche
writes:

... Then Paul appeared ... What he guessed was how one
could use the little sectarian Christian movement apart
from Judaism to kindle a “world fire”; how with the sum-
bol of “God on the cross” one could unite all who lay at the
bottom, all who were secretly rebellious, the whole inheri-
tance of anarchistic agitation in the Empire, into a tre-
mendous power. “Salvation is of the Jews.” Christianity as
a formula with which to outbid the subterranean cults of
all kinds, those of Osiris, of the Great Mother, of Mithras,
for example—and to unite them: in this insight lies the
genius of Paul. His instinct was so sure in this that he took
the ideas with which these chandala religions fascinated,
and, with ruthless violence, he put them into the mouth of
the “Savior” whom he had invented, and not only into his
mouth—he made something out of him that a priest of
Mithras too could understand.

This was his moment at Damascus: he comprehended that
he needed the belief in immortality to deprive “the world”
of value, that the concept of “hell” would become master
even over Rome—that with the “beyond” one kills life.
Nihilism and Christianism: that rhymes, that does not
only rhyme.*°

Ascent to Ideal Man

Nietzsche’s notes for his magnum opus, the great synthesis
of his philosophical thought, which he never completed but
which appeared posthumously as The Will To Power, reveal an
animosity to God for practically the same reasons that moved
Feuerbach to embrace anti-theism. The Nietzschean thesis on
God and religion is as follows. God is man’s alter ego, sub-
limated, of course; he is the mirror of man, the psychological
duplication and personification of the intense love, power and
goodness that man surprisingly finds in himself at rare inter-
vals. Knowing his own weakness and ambiguity, man does not
dare attribute such marvelous virtues to himself, but concludes
they must be the gifts and adornments of some super-creature,
some superhuman being. Thus the strongest in man belongs
beyond man, while the weakest in man belongs to man alone.

30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, pp. 649-650.

60 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Religion, therefore, consists in this process by which man un-
clothes, defrauds and debases himself before an idol. The crea-
tion of God is the product of the diminution of man.

The very heart, therefore, of the human adventure is to be a
spiritual revolution whereby man will regain his greatness by
pitting the recreation of himself against the dissolution of that
“God who is a conjecture.” The Nietzschean exposé of the un-
reality of God and of the conspiracy of Christianity to debase
man is merely the negative side of his adventure in humanism.
His fierce assault on God and Christianity is complemented by
_an ardent passion for the rediscovery and transformation of
man. Listen to his glad tidings to his new men as spoken
through Zarathustra:

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power
of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowl-
edge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and be-
seech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things
and beat their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has
always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead
back to earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the
body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a
human meaning.”!

Thus the splendid decision that effects the rejection of God
and the complete renunciation of religion is a necessary first
step in man’s self-conquest. Only through this decision will the
earth begin to become a site of recovery, exuding a new fra-
grance and bringing salvation and hope. If man clings to God
and religion, he shall have to pay dearly for his cowardice. Let
him move up to become something more than man. The time
has come to shed his God-skin and Christian clothing; history
is presently ordering him to come up higher or suffer sinking
into nihilism. This is his great moment of transition. Will man
ascend or descend? Again Zarathustra exhorts his followers
upward:

Behold, I teach you the Superman. Man is something that
shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond them-

31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 188.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 61

selves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and
even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful
embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Super-
man: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You
have made your way from worm to man, and much in you
is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now too, man
is more ape than any ape.

Whoever is wisest among you is also a mere conflict and
cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become
ghosts or plants? .

Behold, I teach you the Superman. The Superman is the
meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman
shall be the meaning of the earth!*?

As long as God was on the human scene, man had a dolce far
niente existence. Addicted to appealing for everything to the
Almighty, his created powers had atrophied and he had become
a miserable beggar, unable to bestir himself to rise or advance.
But now there lay before him a life of challenge, of hardship,
of suffering and, yes, of loneliness. For, bereft of God, man was
alone, on his own; bleak loneliness has enveloped him and ren-
dered his new condition almost intolerable. He must now cre-
ate out of himself, out of nothingness. Without any outside aid
he was attempting perhaps the impossible—the creation of Su-
perman.

In expounding his revolutionary philosophy of human nature
Nietzsche gives us a rather sketchy and curious account of
man’s place in the cosmos. Of course, with the myth of God
erased, man could hardly be represented any longer as the
metaphysical or spiritual imago Dei. That would be calling for
an imago nihilis, the image of nothingness. Then, too, Nietz-
sche despised those who philosophize as metaphysicians. He
would evaluate man empirically, as he finds him in history.
Thus Nietzsche accepts Darwin’s findings on man up to a point,
the point being man’s evolving origin from lower forms of life
up through the ape to his present form. Nietzsche agrees that
men are merely animals, essentially the same as apes. How-
ever, unlike Darwin, he refuses to believe that all men occupy
a unique position in the cosmos and that the race is inevitably
evolving, through a blind, on-going progress, to the perfection

32. Ibid., Prologue, No. 3, Part 1, pp. 124-125.

62 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

of the millenium. Millions of facts contradict that. naive opti-
mism. Witness the decadence in every phase of nineteenth-
century cultural life.

The truth is that men are distinguished from chimpanzees
only by a potentiality that can raise them above animals in
cultural performance. History demonstrates, however, that the
masses will never better themselves. Because of fear and lazi-
ness they will never become human, but remain animals
forever. The weak are numerous and will ever remain deca-
dent. On the other hand, Nietzsche disagrees with the pessi-
mism of his master, Schopenhauer. The human predicament,
bad as it is, is not all darkness. History shows that there has
ever been the living testimony of a few stronger spirits among
men who have managed to rise above being mere primates and
to make themselves “truly human beings.” Nietzsche, a fervent
believer in the “great man” theory, explains that these molders
of the universe, imbued with spirit and the willingness to
suffer, learned how to “organize the chaos” within themselves
and the cosmos. A Plato, Phidias, Michelangelo, Shakespeare,
Leonardo, Napoleon, Paul, Jesus brought about major changes
in humanity not by the quantity of their work, but by their art
of improving, organizing and beautifying the chaotic in the
flood of human experience; these men of genius integrated,
disciplined, focused into harmony the inexhaustible powers of
life. They improved nature interiorly and exteriorly. Such ex-
amples of greatness emphasized the real meaning of humanity.
“The goal of humanity cannot lie in the end but only in its
highest specimens.” Only such men attain man’s true nature;
the vast majority of men remain animals, never realizing
themselves or achieving true existence. For true existence re-
jects the temptation to allow one’s life to be but a mere acciden-
tal flow of events. True existence is lived when man has “a high
and transfiguring total aim,” a deliberately chosen goal which
is attainable and which gives one’s whole human activity a
powerful thrust upward to the more than human.

Rousseau, Nietzsche felt, by stressing a romantic return to
nature, was insisting that man remain an animal, agitated by
the lowest and cheapest feelings, becoming a beast of prey or
a Catilinian criminal. Rousseau’s reductionism fathered all the
most ignoble modern, social heresies—democracy, socialism,

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 63

humanitarianism, pacifism. His collectivities so easily degen-
erate into revolutionary mobs thirsting for blood, once the re-
straints of culture, artistic tradition and reason are removed.
Instead of urging men to return to nature, Nietzsche challenges
them to “cultivate,” “improve,” “transfigure” and re-create hu-
man nature.

Since the leveling of the vast majority of men is inevitable
and their improvement impossible, Nietzsche takes comfort in
the fact that thousands of years of human degeneration were
really necessary as prelude for better times to come. Plowing
under is a necessary preparation if the ground is to preduce a
superior harvest. Therefore, let the leveling of mankind con-
tinue, nay, let it be accelerated, for only thus will Superman
arrive, the elite Titans who will be the architects of a new
civilization, a new morality, a new eschatology.

... While, in other words, the democratization of Europe
will amount to the creation of a type prepared in the sub-
tlest sense for slavery—the individual, meanwhile, the ex-
ceptional case, the strong man, will turn out to be stronger
and richer than he has probably ever been, thanks to the
lack of prejudice in his schooling, thanks to the enormous
varied practice he can get in skills and disguises. I meant
to say that the democratization of Europe is at the same
time an involuntary arrangement for the training of ty-
rants—taking the word in every sense, including its most
intellectual.**

Brinton shrewdly remarks that “Nietzsche has achieved the
philosopher’s favorite task, the reconciliation of the irreconcil-
able. Hegel could have found no better example for the benign
workings of the dialectic; out of democracy, dictatorship; out of
the rule of the herd-men, the rule of the Supermen.”* We shall
now see how Nietzsche’s discovery of the philosopher’s stone—
the handy ultimate which reveals the meaning of all human
experience—influenced his final evaluation of man, his society
and his destiny.

33. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, translated by Marianne
Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966), HI, p. 175.
34. Crane Brinton, Nietzsche, (New York: Harper, Torchbooks, 1965), p. 130.

64 THE GODS OF ATHEISM
The Will to Power

Nietzsche had been profoundly impressed by Schopenhauer’s
interpretation that Will is the prime principle and mover of the
universe. Schopenhauer had taught that the Will to Existence
or the Will to Live was basically evil. Thus, his pessimism con-
sisted in teaching that human life and human Will, as evils,
must be blunted by living as anemically as possible. The great-
est evil one could do another was to grant the tragedy of life to
another through procreation. Now Nietzsche had read Scho-
penhauer’s The World As Will And Idea when he was a youth
and, though deeply impressed, he did not agree wholeheartedly
nor jump immediately into print to correct his master’s inter-
pretation of the role of the Will in the universe. In his early
writings Nietzsche used the will to power to explain behavior
and did not approve of it. In his work, The Dawn, Nietzsche
admits that he is experimenting with moral evaluations and
prejudices: “With this book begins my campaign against moral-
ity.” He attempts to prove that all psychological phenomena
can be traced back to two fundamental sources: fear and power.
There is yet no sign here that he sees the will to power as the
unifying force of all reality. Kaufmann records Nietzsche’s
journey to his discovery thus:

In his next work, The Gay Science, Nietzsche still experi-
mented with the notion of power and did not yet expound
any monism nor any systematic psychological theory. The
book also contains the first tentative consideration of the
conception of the eternal recurrence of all events. Then,
suddenly, the implications of both the will to power and
the eternal recurrence struck Nietzsche’s mind at once,
like a flash of lightning, and in a frenzied feeling of inspi-
ration he wrote his Zarathustra—the first published work
to contain any mention of the will to power by that name
—and there expounded both concepts. From then on he
considered it his task to work out the details of the insight
which had been offered in the “dithyrambs” of Zarathus-
tra: the universality of both the will to power and the
eternal recurrence.*>

35. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(New York and Cleveland: World, Meridian Books, 1966), p. 162.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 65

Thus the development of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Will
and its function and goal in the universe was a slow process, the
result of years of discernment of the workings of the will in
human psychical histories.

Yet Nietzsche had decided early in life to say Yes to the hu-
man adventure, despite its endlessly harsh trials, indeed, be-
cause of these very hardships he agreed to accept life
cheerfully. Not for him the Nay-saying of Schopenhauer, nor
the near-death quietism of contempt and calm that this philos-
opher advocated. At first, as we have seen, Nietzsche found life
livable because of its enhancement through Grecian tragic art.
But since both Socratism and Christianity had once again de-
graded life and reduced it to chaos and decadence, Nietzsche
realized that tragic art needed the aid of violence or at least of
some more powerful force, if man and his culture were to be
raised from the “slough of despond” to new humanistic heights.
Nietzsche found his philosopher’s stone in the Will to Power; in
his healing hands it would be the panacea for sick society.

Thus Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, an evil thing, was trans-
formed by Nietzsche into his own Will to Power, a very good
reality.

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of
power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad?
Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness?
The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is over-
come.

Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not
virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtù, virtue that is
moraline-free).

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of
our love of man. And they shall even be given every possi-
ble assistance to perish. What is more harmful than any
vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak:
Christianity.3¢

The world, then, is the Will to Power, nothing more. Man
himself is also this Will to Power, nothing else. Life, its instinct
for growth, its durability are all Will to Power. “Where the Will

36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Antichrist, translated by Walter Kaufmann; in
The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 57.

66 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to Power is lacking, there is decline. It is my contention that all
the supreme values of mankind Jack this will—the values
which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lord-
ing it under the holiest names.”°”

Nietzsche’s Will to Power must not be seen as a metaphysical
ideal transcending this world like Plato’s pure ideas. On the
contrary, Nietzsche is forever defending this phenomenal
world against the fraud of the transcendent universe. The Will
to Power is wholly terrestrial. In a world which is a unity in an
eternal evolving process of development and becoming, the
Will to Power is manifested everywhere. Every phase of this
process of becoming can be interpreted as the Will to Power.
Thus, the inner guiding of this universe is this Will to Power;
it exists and directs every phase of organic life. This sweeping
empirical hypothesis for the explanation of whatever happens
in the universe and its diverse forms of evolving life gives unity
to cosmic and human phenomena. The development of high
Greek culture is now explained as an effect of the will to power.
In developing his culture, man wills to outstrip, surpass, sub-
merge and extinguish his rivals. The doubtful outcome of the
struggle stresses the ambiguous nature of the Will to Power. It
is a two-edged sword, capable of producing good or evil, depend-
ing on whether it is wielded by the powerful few, the elite or
by the petty many, the masses. As indicated in the notes which
he left for his projected magnum opus, Nietzsche planned to
trace the lines of influence between the Will to Power and the
many phenomena of the human adventure. Jn a work such as
this, which is focused on the Nietzschean adventure in athe-
ism, we will restrict our study to Nietzsche’s reflections on the
relationship of the Will to Power to the human activities of
knowledge, religion and morality.

Power and Knowledge

The thirst for knowledge is a manifestation of the drive of
the Will for Power. The intellect is a weapon in the Will’s cam-
paign to seize more power: For Bacon, “knowledge is power,” in
the sense that knowledge dispels darkness concerning the na-
ture of reality, reveals truth and thereby liberates man to make

37. Ibid., p. 572.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 67

use of both nature and truth to attain higher culture and more
truth. For Nietzsche knowledge is power for the sake of more
power. Power is its own ultimate, absolute end, the essential
aspect of all being. Man wants power more than life; he con-
tinually risks his life to ascend in power. The aim of knowledge
is not to know or love but to dominate. Each man wants to
master, organize, order the flood of impressions, thoughts, feel-
ings, sensations that sweep in and through him in his process
of becoming. He must do this for the practical needs of his life.
Reality is not stable; it is becoming. Men transform becoming
into being by imposing patterns of stability, unity, familiarity
on the deluge of their experiences. This is the action of the Will
to Power. Knowledge is the Will to Power interpreting the flux
of reality. It follows that all truth is a matter of reading mean-
ing into reality, not of discovering meaning in myself and in
reality. It further follows that for Nietzsche there is no absolute
truth. The idea of absolute truth was, anyway, a hoax, the first
and worst of all deceptions perpetrated by philosophers and
priests who planned to dominate man by entangling him in the
web of religion. These creators of holy illusions were dis-
satisfied with the real world of becoming because it guaranteed
them no security. They, therefore, created a new world where
an Absolute Being, established Truth, and stable positions of
power assured them positions of eternal mastery. As a matter
of fact, contemplation of the real in order to discover its es-
sence and its unchangeable Origin is in today’s modern world
asterile, passive and impossible activity, now that God is really
dead. “We have abolished the world of truth with our Will to
Power.” Nothing is true. The very idea of truth is merely God’s
shade. What place has God’s ghost at the Banquet of Becoming?
Away with the cult of truth! The time has come for the cult of
lucidity. Let us be courageously consistent in our choice of
power over truth. Since God is really dead, then that “reason,”
that “truth,” that “morality” which were rooted in him have
become mere idols, specters of a non-existent world. Today is
the twilight of these idols. One can admit, of course, that truth
is a species of error, a sort of wraith of God, necessary for the
existence of a special type of mentality. Philosophers and
theologians suffer from this diseased mentality; their everlast-
ing activity is to tyrannize over nature. Full of faith in them-

68 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

selves, these hunters after shadows repeat the age-old error.
This error, in the words of Nietzsche, “always creates the world
in its own image; it cannot do otherwise, for philosophy Zs this
tyrannical desire; it is the most spiritual will to power, to “crea-
tion of the world,” to the causa prima.’ But what is a special
cause of resentment to Nietzsche is that these philosophers,
besides tyrannizing over themselves, succeed, as the poet Mil-
ton expressed it, in persuading the multitudes that “millions of
spiritual creatures walk the earth, unseen both when we wake
and when we sleep.” Such teachers are ghouls, robbing the
grave of God and feeding themselves and their followers on His
dead body.

Now Nietzsche admits that some “fictions” are necessary and
useful for controlling the business of human living. Plato’s no-
ble lie was intended to be used for the betterment of the
Athenian citizens. The danger is that arbitrary myths tend to be-
come, in the course of time, unchallenged assumptions, taking
on the aspect of eternal truth. To give but a few examples, such
imyths as the existence of enduring essences, of equal natures, of
the law of causality are not really true. They have achieved
their durability in the minds of men because men have imposed
these myths on the chaos of Becoming in order to preserve
humanity from being swept into annihilation. Myths less useful
to the survival or advancement of the human race have been
discarded as “errors.” Useful myths are retained as “truths.”
Language, therefore, does not mirror reality, but merely masks
a philosophical and theological mythology. Hence all truths are
fictions, subjective interpretations of reality. Now these inter-
pretations are perspectives, points of view, from which one im-
poses on reality what he wills to be there. Perspectives
necessary for the welfare of mankind, Nietzsche accepts not as
true but as useful and good. Perspectives harmful to mankind,
Nietzsche rejects not as untrue but as evil. The religious, God-
oriented perspectival view of the universe and mankind is evil
because such a view places a negative evaluation on this world
and on man’s mission within it. The Will to Power view pre-
serves the dynamism of Becoming for the world and promotes
man to the status of Superman, opening up an infinite horizon

38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, translated by Marianne
Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, Gateway Edition, 1966), p. 9.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 69

and future for man’s unending advancement in power.

Nietzsche has made knowledge the handmaiden of power; he
has made art the serf of power. Thus both knowledge and art
have become propaganda for power. His utilitarian, exploita-
tive theory of knowledge and truth anticipates the pragmatism
of William James and the instrumentalism of John Dewey.
Already William James’ crass statement about truth being “the
cash value of the idea” is prefigured in Nietzsche’s teaching
that truth is the power value of the idea. When the only reason
for knowledge becomes the hotter pursuit for more power, then
truly philosophizing has become a violent hammering activity
that smashes old idols and chisels new ones. Then truly philoso-
phy has become a way of war. And Nietzsche is honest enough
to admit this, He has his new oracle, Zarathustra, drunk with
power, predict for the world a future of fire and slaughter, a
necessary purge for the advent of pitiless Superman. In Ecce
Homo, Nietzsche, the prophet en route to madness, proclaims:
“I herald the coming of a tragic era. We must be prepared for
a long succession of demolitions, devastations and upheavals
... There will be wars such as the world has never yet seen
. .. Europe will soon be enveloped in darkness... We... waiting
on the mountain ... even look forward without any real ċom-
passion to this darkening... our heart overflows with gratitude,
amazement, anticipation, expectation.” “Thanks to me,”
writes Nietzsche in The Will To Power, “a catastrophe is at
hand. A catastrophe whose name I know, whose name I shall
not tell. Then all the earth will writhe in convulsions.” It will
be the advent of nihilism.

Nietzsche proved to be a seer who had a deep insight into the
decadence of his age and a prophet with accurate foresight as
to the tragedies this decadence would engender. Two twen-
tieth-century world wars and the threat of a third establish
Nietzsche as an accurate, far-seeing thinker. His prediction of
a world agonizing from crisis to crisis was a wish come true.
“Thanks to me, a catastrophe!” His Will to Power, his philoso-
phy of aggression, taken seriously by his intellectual heirs and
pushed to their logical, demoniacal limits, have acted as cata-
” lysts to the modern cataclysms. All that man holds dear—the

39. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Joyful Wisdom) in The Portable
Nietzsche, pp. 447-448.

70 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

act of creation, the act of knowledge, the act of loving—all are
acts of the Will to Power, manifestations of aggression. In a
world where aggression is the supreme, nay the only activity,
where the dethronement of God, truth and love are the highest
expressions of the will to power, the acme of aggression, men
are abandoned to endure the hell they have willingly created.

Power, Rank and Religion

Among the stronger spirits who contend for power, it is con-
venient to distinguish between two broadly hostile groups. Both
groups are elites, molders of history whose leaders are intellec-
tually well trained and volitionally well disciplined. Yet each
group is oriented in a direction opposed to the other. One group
is aflame over this world and its thrilling possibilities; the other
is zealous for the world beyond and its glory. The former group
embodies the Will to Power as represented by the highter type
of human—the Warrior for this World of Becoming; the latter
incarnates the Will to Power as represented by the lowly Priest
—the Advocate for the World of the Absolute. Both groups are
in an endless struggle for the control of the mediocre majority,
each hoping to found its own high culture on the necessary,
broad base of a strong, solidly consolidated collectivity. The
Warriors for this world represent a truly ascending form of
human life. On the contrary, the Priests and the mediocre
masses represent decadence, decomposition, weakness. Unlike
the Priests, who pose as shepherds of the herds, it is not the
mission of the elite of this world to lead the masses to greener
pastures or to minister to their needs. The masters of this world
are not servants; they are creators. The miserable masses exist
merely to serve their natural masters as a solid foundation
upon which these lords of the earth can lead their isolated,
superior lives and build for the coming of yet higher types of
man and eventually for Superman. What are the human char-
acteristics that distinguish Warriors from Priests? How may
one distinguish the one from the other?

The Warrior, as master of the earth, is noble by nature. A
lover of this world, he is naturally good as opposed to the un-
naturalness of the despiser of this world. Open, honest, secure
in his exercise of the Will to Power, he has no need to prove his

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 71

might by deeds of cruelty or oppression. Should he harm any-
one, he does so incidentally, unintentionally in the creative use
of his power. Goethe, breaking Friederike’s heart by loving her
tenderly but refusing to marry her, had no wish to hurt this
darling creature. But acting out of his own creative, overflow-
ing power, he could not be expected to restrict his genius by
concern for others. The truly powerful master must concen-
trate on self-discipline, self-creation. Thus, the warrior is
strong, healthy, handsome, noble in bearing; he delights in the
harshness of bodily combat. And he heartily, regularly enjoys
the indulgences of his healthy sense appetites. He is a shining,
physical paragon of Dionysos. He is motivated by honor, not by
selfish interests. He is the acme of finesse and gentility with a
keen appreciation for Order and Rank. He is, in a word, aristo-
cratic with an aristocracy of excellence in taste and perfor-
mance. Yet he hates with the same enthusiasm as he loves,
loathing demagogism, enlightenment, romanticism, pity,
plebeian familiarity, religion and God, especially the Christian
God and religion.

The Priest, on the other hand, is intrinsically ignoble, unnatu-
ral, evil. Physically weak, diseased in mind and, at times, in
body, he is a “professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of
life.’4° He is unable to enjoy clean sensuousness; he lacks the
honor, pride, forthright honesty of the Warrior. He reaches for
power through control of the consciences of princes and pau-
pers. This will for power, perversely strong, is abetted by an
intensely sharpened intellect. His craftiness compensates for
his puniness; his virtuosity with concepts and words conquers
the crowds and his physically superior warriors. He employs by
instinct “the most wide-spread, really subterranean, form of
falsehood on the earth.”*! Through the ages priests and warri-
ors have battled for the soul of society and civilization, but the
priests have always won the victory. The Warrior, the elite of
this world, has never yet been appreciated nor given his right-
ful place of power in society.

Even in the past this higher type has appeared often-but
as a fortunate accident, as an exception, never as some-

40. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 575.
41. Ibid, pp. 575-576.

72 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

thing willed. In fact, this has been the type most dreaded-
almost the dreadful-and from dread the opposite type was
willed, bred and attained; the domestic animal, the herd
animal, the sick animal-the Christian.”

We have seen, earlier in this chapter how the shrewd, degen-
erate priests won over the masses to their side, enlisting them
as enemies against their natural masters. The priests estab-
lished themselves as lords of the masses over the opposition of
their naturally superior foe, the warriors, by inventing God,
morality and religion. And their greatest, secret weapon was
the creation of Christian dogma and ethics. Both these sopo-
rifics silently soothed and satisfied the yearnings for salvation
of the millions—that organized collectivity which outnum-
bered and overwhelmed the elite power cells of this world.
Then this organized Christian multitude, under the versatile
direction of a disciplined hierarchy, adapted itself to meet the
rising expectations of a modern society that had turned demo-
cratic progress into a new religion. This fraudulent accomoda-
tion has had the effect of rendering the Christian religion so far
impregnable. What is to be done? Are we to concede final vic-
tory and give up the fight to work for superior men? Not at all!
The time has come for the new barbarism which will break the
chains of priestly domination. The new immoralists have as
their mission to liberate the priest-ridden masses and open the
way for the free development of superior individuals.

A new pride my ego taught me, and this I teach men: no
longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things,
but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a
meaning for the earth.?

The time has come to oppose morality with immorality, to call
what priests call good, evil and what they call evil, good. The
time has come for the transvaluation of all values.

Power and Values

The way to destroy Christianity, that blight which degraded
man by ruining Greek beauty, demolishing the Roman Empire,

42, Ibid, pp. 570-571.
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 144.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 73

thwarting Islam and, thanks to the vengeance of Luther,
transfiguring the Renaissance, is for the highest few of this
world, imitating their master Nietzsche, “to condemn Chris-
tianity as the highest of all conceivable corruptions.” And then
to set their hearts on the creation of the potentially higher man,
the Superman, by jettisoning the insufferable burden of Chris-
tian morality. Unlike Feuerbach, who chose humanity as the
object and goal of his transforming ministrations, Nietzsche
despised humanity and chose only the highest caste—the few-
est—for his process of glorification. “Man is something which
must be surpassed; man is a bridge and not a goal.” Neverthe-
less, Superman will not be achieved through the blind process
of inevitable evolution toward the perfect. Reality is not that
benign. Only the Will to Power activated intensely in superior
individuals will incarnate Superman from a myth to a man.
History testifies that man is quite willing to remain mired in
gross animality. Without the aid of great individuals, he will
sink back into the wriggling anonymity of the worm.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope
over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-
way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering
and stopping. And what is great in man is that he is a
bridge and not an end.**

Thus Superman is the meaning of the earth and, unless the
elite of this world work hard for his coming, man, as “a rope
tied between beast and Overman,” will certainly plunge into
the abyss of animality. The elite must continually repeat the
following Zarathustrian battle cry: “Let your Will say: Super-
man is to be the meaning of the earth.” Here the Will to Power
is identified with the Will to Being, imitating in its own fashion
the God of the Christians Will to Creation: Fiat lux. And in
relation to man the Christian God had said: Faciamus homi-
nem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. But Nietzsche
and his followers proclaim in defiance of the Christian God’s
creative edict an opposing one of their own: Let us make Super-
man to our own image and likeness. For we are now at a point
in history when we noble ones can, for the first time, plan on
a grand scale for human nature. We are ready to put into prac-

44, Ibid., pp. 126-127.

74 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tice our design for breeding the Superman.

But the new nobles, the Supermen, will never make an
appearance in history until the elite of this world have the
courage to transvalue all values. They must have the audac-
ity to smash the Judaeo-Christian tablets of the moral law
and to proclaim, like a new Moses from a mountain top of thun-
der and lightning, a new code of values, a code which arises
out of the superabundance of the elite’s surging vitality
and Will to Power. Superman is the Warrior for the World
par excellence. He and his followers will overthrow the rule of
the Church and her priest-directed slaves. Superman will re-
store the strong to power. By personifying in himself the
new values, Superman will rescue the earth from “the despis-
ers of life” who poison themselves and others with the arsenic
of other-worldliness.

Superman and his followers will be cruel, hard, ruthless, piti-
less, unscrupulous, deceitful, boastful, truculent, sensual and
frivolous. Their motto will be: “Evil, be thou my good!” But
sometimes Nietzsche seems to be logically and defiantly incon-
sistent. For besides practicing all the above-mentioned “vir-
tues,” the new nobles will also be brave, honorable, strong,
serious, lofty and ascetical. Superman and his elite are clearly
enigmas, moral paradoxes, men “beyond good and evil.” This
dilemma will not be understood unless one realizes that the
new elite neither professes nor practices any uniform, univer-
sal, absolute moral code. The reason is that such an absolutist
moral code is the fruit of religious resentment and arises from
an attitude of nay-saying to life in this world. The absolutist
moral code, called by Nietzsche a slave-morality, represents a
form of descending, degenerate life. The virtues that slave-
morality extols, such as kindness and humility, are beneficial
to the society of the weak and the powerless, but regarded by
strong, independent individuals as dangerous and evil.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happi-
ness where others would find their destruction: in the
labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others,
in experiments; their joy is self-conquest; asceticism
becomes in them nature, need, instinct. Difficult tasks are
a privilege to them; to play with burdens which crush oth-
ers, a recreation. Knowledge—a form of asceticism. They

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 75

are the most venerable kind of man; that does not preclude
their being the most cheerful and kindliest. They rule not
because they want to but because they are; they are not
free to be second.**

Superman’s morality represents the highest grade of moral-
ity among different standards of morality. The standards of
slave-morality condemn the “good” men of master-morality as
evil. Since slave-morality is the morality of the masses, its
moral evaluations fulfill the needs of the herd. Hence the
herd is expected to practice its degenerate morality, since its
utility is found in promoting the existence, survival and wel-
fare of the herd community. There can actually be a peaceful
co-existence between slave- and master-moralities, provided
the slaves control their Will to Power for forcing their own
low values upon the elite of this world, provided they give up
their ambition to dominate the masters and remain content to
keep their values to themselves. But, of course, the herd is not
content to do this and, therefore, Superman is needed to curb
the masses.

The new nobility of this world, on the other hand, are called
upon to accept the values of Superman, values which alone will
enable man to transcend his present position of decadence.
Superman and his followers, therefore, must stand beyond good
and evil in the sense that they are far superior to the good and
evil of herd morality. Under no circumstances are they to be
obligated to follow the common level of morality. For this low
code reduces all men to egalitarian mediocrity, prevents the
development of the master class and destroys the quality of
human art and culture. It is clear, then, that Nietzsche does not
free his elite from all moral restraint or encourage it to moral
libertinism. Such license would beget personal and social chaos
and suicide. Yet only the elite can safely live “beyond good and
evil” in the sense that they alone can transcend the decadent
Christian morality of resentment which endeavors to impose
its own values universally. Living beyond these decadent val-
ues, the higher type of man creates new values that express an
ever ascending life toward the perfection of this world in Su-
perman. Therefore, let slave-morality be for slaves and master-

45. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, pp. 645-646.

76 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

morality for masters. But let the former keep to itself, far below
the latter in a spirit of peaceful coexistence.

Power, History and Eternal Recurrence

But.Superman, driven on by a superior Will to Power, coura-
geously transvaluing all values and audaciously living by the
higher standards of the new immoralism, is not yet Nietzsche’s
highest honor for this world and life. There remains the glory
of immortalization. For if all life, and especially the higher
type of culture and morality, are irrevocably annihilated by
death, what does it profit the higher men to live with a yea-
saying attitude to this world? It would seem senseless to build
up what is doomed to utter extinction. Since he had already
rejected the Christian view of world history, Nietzsche had to
solve this dilemma with some hopeful doctrine of his own. It
would scarcely be wise for Nietzsche to place himself in the
psychologically awkward position of exhorting his master type
to work mightily now merely for personal and social oblitera-
tion in a little while. Psychologist Nietzsche met this problem
by making Zarathustra, prophet of Superman, the herald of the
doctrine of eternal recurrence as well. But a brief résumé of
Nietsche’s view of world history is needed to place his theory
of eternal recurrence into proper perspective.

Christianity gave birth to a total, unified view of world his-
tory founded on such doctrines as: creation, the fall, the Incar-
nation, Redemption, Sanctification, the Parousia and the final
Judgment. Christ, the God-Man, is the beginning, center and
end of human and cosmic history. Because of Him, mankind
has developed the Will to Absolute Truthfulness and Absolute
Morality. But this Will to Absolute Truth and Morality, like a
two-edged sword, divided mankind into two violently hostile
camps, those accepting and those rejecting the Christian view
of history. The Christian view of history is thrilling, tragic,
exalting yet crushing; it is simultaneously fearful and paradox-
ically peaceful. The Christian is sure of the meaning of history.
For him the historical process is not arbitrary, not a mere,
evolutionary, blind changing upward. The profound meta-
physical and theological meaning behind empirical events, al-

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 77

though not traced by the Christian in all or even most of its
details, is, nevertheless, known to be fundamentally about deci-
sions made by God and men concerning the salvation of each
individual soul and the advent of the final kingdoms of Satan
and God. The Christian views the past, present and future as
integrally important in God’s plan to redeem society and the
cosmos. Events are oriented to the restoration of all things in
Christ.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, looked back to the Greek tragic
era before Socrates as the pinnacle of man’s glory in history. At
present man has fallen very low from that high stature. If he
is to ascend again those lofty heights of Antiquity, he will have
to re-create his society and, through the high standards of the
new immoralism, effect a rapprochement with the Greek
world of tragedy. It was Christianity that poisoned and killed
the grandeur of Antiquity. The time has come to reject the
Christian view of history which brought man so low. Nietzsche
taught, therefore, that there is a valid total view of history. Man
creates meaning in empirical events; he does not discover a
meaning that is there nor an intelligent, transcendent, absolute
Director of these events. That way lies superstition. Reality is
beyond meaning, beyond lack of meaning. Moreover, this is not
a singular universe. History, far from being a single course of
decisive events under the guidance of divine and human intelli-
gence, is in reality “fragmented into an experimental labora-
tory for coining men.” History is “the great testing plant.”
“Mankind does not advance; it does not even exist. The total
aspect is that of a huge experimental station, where some tests
succeed ... and countless others fail.” Here is a complete rever-
sal of a total view of history, a repudiation of the idea of unity
in history. Nietzsche erases the idea of unity in history and
writes in his own idea of eternal recurrence. Naturally, the
emphasis in history now shifts from a unified theme and goal
of history to ways of trying to understand history and guide it
toward a man-imposed ideal. This process is to be determined
by the Will to Power of the higher men. The superior type of
man will now replace God, the Christian Creator and guiding
Spirit of history, and plan and manage history as a whole him-
self. This conscious realization of cosmic power fills the higher
men with joy. But all joy wants eternity. And eternal recur-

78 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

rence is the only guarantee of eternal joy in the possession of
power in time and in this world. Eternal recurrence in Nietz-
sche is the antithesis of any faith which looks to another world
for eternal joy. In Zarathustra we read:

... If ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said,
“You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!” Then you
wanted back all. All anew, all eternally, all entangled,
ensnared, enamored—oh, then you loved the world... I
beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth
and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly
hopes.*®

Thus, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is fundamental to
Nietzsche’s philosophy of man, the cosmos and history. He ad-
mits that the idea is rather dismal, even oppressive. But just as
the Christian faces death as the severest test of his ability to
say Yes to God so the higher men use the eternal recurrence as
the supreme test of their willingness to say Yes to the world and
life as they are. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, imagines a
demon appearing to one of the loneliest of the higher types—
one is reminded of Satan tempting Christ in the desert—and
putting the ultimate temptation, in the sense of a trial and test,
before this soul. “This life as you now live it and have lived it,
you will have to live once more and innumerable times more,
and there will be no things new in it . .* all in the same succes-
sion and sequence.”4” Will you curse and gnash your teeth at
this dismal destiny, thereby becoming a nay-sayer to life? Or
will you “crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate,
eternal confirmation and seal,” thereby becoming a yea-sayer
to the world of eternal Becoming? The world-approving elite, in
so far as they are actors in this life, want to act the play over
and over again forever. In so far as they are spectators, their
eternal cry is encore! encore! They gladly follow their master
Zarathustra whose destiny it is to be the teacher of the eternal
recurrence. Their highest courage and Will to Power is to ac-
cept gladly “the eternal recurrence even of the smallest” peo-
ple who cause in the elite “disgust with all existence.” And
“Alas, nausea! nausea! nausea!” Even so, despite this meta-

46. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 435.
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Gay Science, pp. 101-102.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 79

physical sickness, the elite welcome the recurrence of every
last detail of this life. “Oh, how should I not lust after eternity
and after the nuptial ring of rings—the ring of the recur-
rence”

Besides being a theory, eternal recurrence is presented as an
empirical hypothesis by Nietzsche. Energy, once thought to be
unlimited, is now known to be limited. This being so, “the prin-
ciple of the conservation of energy” appeared to Nietzsche to
be both a demand and a proof of eternal recurrence. Energy
that is eternally active cannot create eternally new forms. It
must, therefore, return under the same forms. Everything has
returned, will return again; occurrences are but recurrences;
present history was once past and past history will again be
future. There is nothing new anywhere, neither on the sun,
beyond the sun nor under the sun. Nothing is beginning or
arriving on the closed, revolving wheel of eternal recurrence.
The cosmos is locked up against penetration from above and
barred in against escape to the beyond. We are back on the
wheel of fate forged by the Stoics, yoked. forever to the tread-
mill of cosmopolitan necessitarianism. Our monotonous round
of duties is confined world without end to the compound of
cosmic captivity.

Critique

Gabriel Marcel, outstanding French dramatist-philosopher,
in a lecture given at Loyola University in New Orleans, March
25, 1965, entitled “Man Before the Death of God,” said of Nietz-
sche:

Without a doubt, there can be no greater mistake than to
say Nietzsche belongs to the past, for it is the contrary that
is true. Even, and above all, for those who regard them-
selves as his opponents, Nietzsche is the most modern of
the moderns.

Stephen Tonsor, writing in National Review, January 18,
1968, has this to say of Nietzsche: “During the 1870s and 1880s
when the new physics, the new symbolic art and literature, the
new psychology, new social theories and the new philosophy

48. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 340.

80 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

were being formulated, the German-speaking lands were the
cuttingedge of revolutionary society and radical thought. Of
those German thinkers none was more characteristic than the
prophet of modernity, Friedrich Nietzsche... the great philoso-
phical poet of the late nineteenth century.”

Nietzsche, therefore, is still very much with us. However
shall we evaluate him, this philosopher whose thought runs
over in all directions? In his manner of living and his manner
of thinking and writing, Nietzsche was a man of extremes. The
good-willed reader who opens his soul to Nietzsche cannot fail
to come to this conclusion. And Nietzsche would agree with
him. “We immoralists do not even need to lie... We would come
into power even without the truth ... The magic which fights
for us is the magic of extremism.’*? And in answer to a letter
from his friend Georg Brandes, Nietzsche exclaims: “The ex-
pression ‘aristocratic radicalism’ which you are using is very
good. If you permit me, this is the most intelligent word I have
thus far read about myself.” Then too, Nietzsche foresaw the
public victory of the extreme side of his thinking and it gave
him the experience of triumphant power. His letter to Paul
Deussen states, speaking of his latest manuscript at the pub-
lishers: “When I am done, much of what was debatable till now
is no longer debatable. The realm of tolerance has been re-
duced by means of value judgments of the first order to mere
cowardice and weakness of character. To be a Christian—to
name but one result—will henceforth be considered indecent.
Much of this most revolutionary conversion (transvaluation of
all values) of which the world shall know, is already going on
and progressing inside me.”*! Or again, in a letter to his friend
Brandes concerning his autobiography, Ecce Homo, which
Marcel thinks was written in a state of delirium, Nietzsche
boasts:

With a cynicism which is destined to become world histori-
cal, I have now related myself. The book is called Ecce
Homo and is an assassination without the least respect for
the crucified one. It ends with thunder and lightning

49. Quoted by Jaspers, op. cit.,
50. Friedrich Nietzsche, apd lished Letters, p. 125.
51. bid., pp. 142-143.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 81

against everything Christian or infected by Christianity so
that you won’t know any more where to turn or what to do.
At last Iam the first psychologist of Christianity and, old
artillerist that I am, can move up heavy guns the existence
of which not even any opponent of Christianity had sus-
pected in the least. The whole is the prelude to the Trans-
valuation of All Values, the work which lies before me,
finished. I swear to you, in two years we shall have the
whole earth in convulsion. I am a destiny.

Indeed Nietzsche was destined to be the true prophet of the
madness of modernity. His prophecies of doom were accurate
to a ghastly degree. His new barbarians swept the world into
two volcanic wars in the first half of the twentieth century.
This same barbarism, structured on the backs of a billion
slaves, advancing through terrorism, is presently probing the
earth’s free hegemony in so-called skirmishes of national liber-
ation as preliminary warm-ups to what may be the ultimate
atomic blow-up of civilization on the earth. Nietzsche’s books
have been successful because of their high voltage shock value.
There is a hypnotizing fascination in Dionysian fanaticism.
But besides the chaotic excesses, there are the gifts of this
writer. These have attracted millions, like moths, to fly into his
incandescent madness. The style is sharp, violent, petulant,
poetic, epigrammatic, declamatory, clear, ambiguous through
sudden and surprising changes. Nietzsche is always straining
to say what no one else had ever said, to be unique, to be su-
preme in his writing and in his ideas. “I am not a man: I am
dynamite,” says Nietzsche in Ecce Homo.

Philologist Nietzsche was an early pioneer among the expe-
ditions to demythologize the Gospels. His virulent attacks on
everything divine or supernatural in the New Testament make
his modern death-of-God heirs appear as “backward Christian
exegetes” in comparison. “For as a philologist one sees behind
the holy books ... the philologist [says] swindle.” “One should
read the Gospels as books of seduction by means of morality
... What follows from this? That one does well to put on gloves
when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much

52. Ibid, pp. 147-148.
53. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tke Antichrist, p. 628.

82 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

uncleanness almost forces one to do this . . . Need J add that in
the whole New Testament there is only a single figure who
commands respect? Pilate, the Roman governor.”®4

Copleston has this to say of Nietzsche’s manic eruptions
against the Gospel and Christianity: “As for Nietzsche’s atti-
tude to Christianity, his increasingly shrill attack on it is ac-
companied by an increasing inability to do justice to his foe.
And it is arguable that the vehemence of his attack was partly
an expression of an inner tension and uncertainty which he
endeavored to stifle.”=*

Despite Heidegger’s efforts to make him one at all costs,
Nietzsche was no metaphysician. His work has stimulated oth-
ers to think in one direction or another. But as for himself,
given to “philosophizing with a hammer,” Nietzsche smashed
all dialogue and dialectic with other philosophers. He isolated
himself and his thought from the rays of dialectic scrutiny so
that his meaning of life might triumph unopposed. Jaspers tells
us that Nietzsche’s attitude to being suffered from universal
negativity, from unending dissatisfaction with all aspects of
being. Rather than reason carefully, Nietzsche oscillated from
desperate denials to boundless assertions. His philosophy often
slipped into the fanaticism of pronunciamento. “Nothing is
true, all is permitted.” Even his terms are words of will rather
than products of the intellect: Life, Strength, Will to Power,
Superman, Breeding, Eternal Recurrence, Dionysos. All such
expressions, though packed with dynamite, suffered from ex-
traordinary vagueness and ambiguity, even changing meaning
to suit their author’s volatile moods. Contradictions are the
curse of Nietzsche’s writings. But since Nietzsche holds truth
to be relative, it never bothered him to be inconsistent. From
within the dynamic process of Becoming, of which he admitted
he was a blirid, integral part, Nietzsche himself decides what
is ascending and descending life, who is master and who is
slave, what is the intelligible structure and meaning of the
Becoming process, what are slave and what are master morals.
Such sheer subjectivism by a subject himself caught up as a
blind part of an inevitable recurring Becoming sucked Nietz-

54. Ibid., p. 626.
55. Frederick Copleston, S.J., History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday
and Co., Image Books, 1965), Part II, Vol. 7, p. 193.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 83

sche’s thought into a whirlpool of absurdities. From this vortex
of chaotic contradictions, the blackest human urges have been
released; a veritable legion of human devils have made use of
Nietzsche’s intoxicating excesses. to scourge the human race.

We know enough from his books and letters to be able to say
categorically that Nietzsche would have shrunk in horror from
the dogmatism of Nazism and anti-semitism. He loathed the
power of the collective State and condemned his brother-in-
law’s militant anti-semitism. Yet the fact remains that these
plagues against humanity were spawned from the misrepre-
sentations and applications arising from Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy of nihilism. His arbitrary doctrines of Will to Power,
Superman, Blond Beast, racial purity, anti-theistic atheism, in-
flamed and fed to militant madness such ugly, egotistic mon-
sters as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini who, with their millions
hypnotized by these extremisms, strove to devour each other in
an orgy of cannibalistic fury. Nietzsche, the immoralist, gave
such tyrants the moral code they needed to justify their po-
groms—the secular religion of Superman and the dominating
morality of the masters.

Now what shall we say of Nietzsche, who admits that “his
whole philosophy has theologians’ blood in its veins?” Nietz-
sche, the anti-theistic theologian who is proud to be kin to
priests! Though fascinated by the attractive personality of
Jesus, Nietzsche, nevertheless, passionately refused to wel-
come this supreme exister. Christ represented an obstacle to
Nietzsche’s vocation to love this world and give it himself and
all his meaning. Christ was so clearly from above, a witness
against the pure, immanent meaning of this world. Christ was
an invitation, an invocation to come up higher, to leave the
world for the transcendent, tri-Personal Truth and Love. Nietz-
sche, Dionysos-Zarathustra, shrank from this easy escapism.
That way the herd stampeded in wild fear into heaven. But not
Zarathustra-Nietzsche. Infected with the spiritual infantilism
of frenzied envy, Nietzsche determined to walk alone, stranded
if need be in a world of golden ice and azure sky, where he need
no longer encounter man, but commune solely with himself.
Nietzsche, bursting with envy, wrote his own Gospels, modeled
on the New Testament, but carefully calculated to be contra-
dictions to the teaching of Jesus:

84 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

It is true that if you do not become as little children again,
you will not be able to enter into that kingdom of heaven
(and Zarathustra pointed to the sky). But we have no wish
to enter the kingdom of heaven; we have become men—
that is why we want the kingdom of the earth.5¢

It was André Gide who shrewdly analyzed the sickness of
Nietzsche’s spirit. Nietzsche was insanely jealous of Jesus.
Gide writes: “In the presence of the Gospel, Nietzsche’s im-
mediate and profound reaction was—it must be admitted—
jealousy. It does not seem to me that Nietzsche’s work can be
really understood without allowing for that feeling. Nietzsche
was jealous of Christ, jealous to the point of madness. In writ-
ing his Zarathustra, Nietzsche was continually tormented with
the desire to contradict the Gospel. Often he adopted the actual
form of the Beatitudes in order to reverse them. He wrote An-
tichrist and in his last work, Ecce Homo, set himself up as the
victorious rival of Him whose teaching he proposed to sup-
plant.”5” Nietzsche, then, suffered from a God-complex, from
an obsession to be the Savior of mankind. And he fumed in envy
and hatred that Jesus had pre-empted this role two thousand
years before him. Yet when he was under the appealing spell
of Jesus, he everywhere likened himself and his doctrine to
that of the Savior. Jesus, like Nietzsche, was “beyond good and
evil.” They both sided against those who judge; both wanted to
be the destroyers of morality. “Jesus said: ‘What do we sons of
God care for morality’?”5* Nietzsche, like Jesus, had to fight the
Pharisees of his day, to challenge the apathy and stupidity of
the masses, to denounce the decadence and arrogance of the
learned. Nietzsche, like Jesus, scandalized everyone; both were
set for the rise and fall of many. When he finally went mad,
Nietzsche’s fascination with Jesus attained the illusion of iden-
tity. He signed his last letters to Gast and Brandes, “The Cru-
cified One.” But when he was under the influence of his
jealousy, his hatred of his arch rival poured like fiery, molten
lava from his resentful heart:

That holy anarchist who summoned the people at the bot-
tom, the outcasts and “sinners,” the chandalas within Ju-

56. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 428.
57. André Gide, Oeuvres Completes.
58. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 164, p. 87.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 85

daism, to opposition against the dominant order—using
language, if the Gospels were to be trusted, which would
lead to Siberia today too—was a political criminal in so far
as political criminals were possible at all in an absurdly
unpolitical community. This brought him to the cross: the
proof for this is the inscription on the cross. He died for
his guilt. All evidence is lacking, however often it has been
claimed, that he died for the guilt of others.5°

Nietzsche never forgave Jesus for taking the side of the lowly
and poor against the mighty. Thousands of years before Nietz-
sche, Jesus had already revealed the decrepitude of master-
morality. That Christ should have preferred “howling and
gnashing of teeth” to “those who laugh here,” that was the
greatest sin on earth.

“Poor Nietzsche,” writes de Lubac, “reproaching Christianity
with being found on resentment!” His whole life and thought
are steeped in resentment. The petulant childishness of en-
throning man in the place of his dethroned God. The shallow
trick of blaming the existence of evil on Socrates, St. Paul and
the Christians is too absurd to merit serious refutation. Nietz-
sche does not write with historical accuracy. His doctrine that
Christianity began as a Jewish conspiracy is an example of how
he often substituted creative writing for historical scholarship.
His naive substitution of secularized Superman for sanctified
sons of God as the fulfillment of the serpent’s seduction: Eritis
sicut dii is another mythical transposition of Christian truth to
a philosophy of immanent egotism. The dreary, pseudo-scien-
tific, oriental promise of eternal recurrence is a diseased ap-
proximation of Christian immortality in eternal mansions.
Nietzsche was forever knocking things down, taking delight in
destruction:

O my brothers, am I cruel? But I say: what is falling, we
should still push. Everything today falls and decays: who
would check it? But I—I even want to push it. Do you know
the voluptuous delight which rolls stones into steep
depths? These human beings of today—look at them, how
they roll into my depth! I am a prelude of better players,
O my brothers! A precedent! Follow my precedent! And he
whom you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster!®

59. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, p. 599.
60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 321.

86 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

All of these extreme doctrines are thus seen to be the products
of a serious but sick man. The reference to his sickness is not
meant to be a personal attack, but merely to put Nietzsche’s
thought within its human, historical context. Nietzsche’s let-
ters are replete with reports of his illnesses—migraine head-
aches, insomnia, extreme tensions. He wrote under great
excitement and exaltation which took a terrible toll of his
health. His letters reveal him as being in constant quest of
vigorous health, preoccupied with diet, climate, sedatives, dis-
ease and castration. Physically and spiritually Nietzsche was a
sick man writing in and against a sick age.

Conclusion

Why does Nietzsche remain, even today, the apostle to the
Moderns? Because he continues to fulfill a prophecy about what
he would do to modern mankind. And that prophecy is enun-
ciated in the form of a curse. Speaking of his “irksome admir-
ers,” of the “apes of Zarathustra,” of “the unwarranted and
wholly unfit who will some day cite my authority,” Nietzsche
fulminates:

To this mankind of today, I will not be a light, nor be called
a light. Those I will blind! Put out their eyes, O flash of my
wisdom!*!

The “magic of extremism” has triumphed, as Nietzsche pre-
dicted. It has extinguished the light in millions of minds. In the
realm of religion this prophet of atheism prepared the human
spirit for its arrogant adventure of incarnating absolutist anti-
theism into a world-organized, armed, militant movement
which has for the past fifty years been waging war on many
fronts for the exclusive possession of the cosmos and human
community. In the realm of morals, the magic of Nietzsche’s
exaggerated subjectivism has shattered his merely two codes
of slave- and master-morality into millions of relativistic,
situational standards egotistically lived by infallible private
consciences.

This excess of moral individualism has also had the effect of
undermining civil law and opening the flood gates to social

61. Quoted by Jaspers, op. cit; pp. 106-107.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 87

chaos and suicide in the forms of soaring individual crimes
against citizens and spreading organized wars against large
city communities. How faithfully the modern mind is fulfilling
Nietzsche’s exhortation: “O my brothers... Follow my prece-
dent!”

Has not Nietzsche’s preposterous willing backwards in the
fatalistic acceptance of eternal recurrence been reversed by
the communists’ equally fanatical willing forwards in the fa-
talistic acceptance of the classless society? Extremes beget ex-
tremes and here is a classic example of that verity. Both
wilfully blind faiths in a fanatical Future, though posing as
liberators of mankind, actually torture man by stretching and
pulling him apart on the rack of the lust for power. Yes, Nietz-
sche is modern because his anti-Christian humanism is slowly
but surely convincing even free societies that the fullfillment
of human existence is to be attained solely in terms of secula-
rized power rather than in terms of fidelity to God and man.
Nietzsche is modern because he has taught man how to use
effectively, against God and his fellow man, the tactic.of revolt.
His magic of extremism, when carefully scrutinized, is seen to
be the magic of revolt. His revolutionary craze was highly con-
tagious and has spread like wildfire through almost every
phase of human endeavor. We have indicated a few examples
of this craze above. Let us try to analyze this tactic more exten-
sively in the area that is directly pertinent to this book—God
and religion, especially Christianity.

Even within the Catholic Church Nietzsche has his follow-
ers. Many of these would be shocked to be confronted with this
fact, for they certainly are not conscious of being off-spring of
Nietzsche. Nevertheless, some of their doctrines and, above all,
their dialectical tactics are infected with the canker of Nietz-
schean resentment. We saw earlier in this chapter that Nietz-
sche replaced logical discussion with vigor, intenseness and
energy of assertion. This technique is calculated to win over the
majority of minds who crave instant, emotional certainty,
freed from the hardship of patiently sifting assertion from per-
formance, fact from fiction. Rhetoric succeeds through the
magic of extremely ardent speech; revolution through the
magic of extremely shocking deeds. These are Nietzschean tac-
tics par excellence.

Now within the Catholic Church many are experiencing, as

88 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Nietzsche suggested men should, in imitation of himself, “the
voluptuous delight which rolls stones into depths.” Some theolo-
gians, priests, journalists and professors are swelling their egos
with the thrills of making shocking doctrinal pronunciamentos.
Out of breath with excitement at advocating dangerous here-
sies, they deny the physical resurrection of Christ, the Virgin
Birth, the Real Presence, faith and good works as necessary for
salvation and the infallibility of the Church. Others, hastening
to be up-to-date in the magical Secular City of Harvey Cox, advo-
cate pre-marital sex, birth control through artificial means,
homosexuality for some and the abolition of the ten command-
ments in favor of the law of Love governed by situation ethics.
Nietzsche would certainly recognize his heirs in these secula-
rized solons for the transvaluation of all values. Here is a frenzy
for revolutionary innovation that borders on madness. In the
realm of religious discipline, rhetorical ranting against the au-
thority of the Church, against the policies of this group of bish-
ops as opposed to that, against the policies and pronouncements
even of the Pope testify to the magic of resentment that shakes
priests and faithful. Certainly some of the Christian ranters
have put a Nietzschean interpretation on the alleged opposition
between the Institutional Church and the Faithful, the former,
of course, being the masters and the latter the slaves. There is a
thrill in this “coming of age” superiority that allows one to sit in
judgment over the powers that be. When we scan the field of
liturgy, we are shocked to find some bohemian liturgists eager to
try anything for the thrill of novelty. They arrogantly contemn
all the great creations of former geniuses—art, music, poetry,
language. They think nothing of desacralizing these and dese-
crating the Holy Sacrifice for the sake of the magic of moder-
nity. Like Nietzsche, they are dissatisfied with everything in the
Temple of God.

In the field of Catholic journalism, ah, there Nietzsche’s ad-
vice is followed with a vengeance. “What is falling, we should
still push.” Do two cardinals disagree on some point of doctri-
nal emphasis or policy of the Church? The media sensational-
ize it into a religious and even political feud! Is a priest
disciplined? Authoritarianism is running rampant! Does a
priest defect? He is loaded with invitations, interviews, glamo-
rized, lionized on Catholic campuses, commercial TV and radio,

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 89

in the slick magazines—publicized for the national and inter-
national millions to gape and gulp. Many Catholic journalists,
professors and lesser lights, suffering from intellectual inferi-
ority and moral mediocrity, experience voluptuous joy in tear-
ing down their Church, liberally infecting with their own
resentment the millions who are avaricious for the new, the
bizarre, the unnatural. The same mania for pushing human
beings into depths has now been discovered by faculty and stu-
dents on Catholic campuses. Waving banners which read “aca-
demic freedom” or “students’ rights” but which demand
academic license and student control, thrilling demonstration
after thrilling demonstration pushes and pushes until heads do
roll into the depths of abject surrender of authority and craven
abandonment of moral and academic standards. If there is any
place where Nietzsche’s tactics of intimidation have been suc-
cessful, that place today is the Catholic college and university.
There the triumph of extremism has become identified with
the triumph of mediocrity.

We have no intention of leaving the reader with the false
impression that the phenomenon of Nietzschean resentment is
restricted to the Catholic Church. It flows over into and tortures
Christianity throughout the world. For example, who does not
see that Protestantism today is being reduced from a form of
Christianity to a form of social service, through the mania for
exclusive concern over civil rights? Yet the maddening lust for
wild and “way-out” speculations, for advancing from shock to
shock to new, extreme activities has permeated all human ac-
tivities, leading to the crisis of chaos in art, music, theatre,
cinema, literature, philosophy and politics. And Nietzsche re-
mains on the podium, directing this cacophony of chaos. He
predicted and willed it all. “For the hour has come, you know
it, for the great, bad, long, slow revolt of the mob and slaves: it
grows and grows ... Lascivious greed, galled envy, aggrieved
vengefulness, mob pride: all that leaped into my face.”®

There it is, the magic of progressive modernity! Following
Nietzsche, “the prelude of better players,” those who have
come in his spirit have not done badly. Outrageously denying
the true and rejecting the traditional, they have accelerated the
process of pushing persons and society into the steep depths of

62. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 382.

90 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

confusion. It is true that, upon examination, the wonderful
deeds of the Nietzschean enthusiasts are discovered to be in-
ferior products of posturing and bluffing would-be Saviors who
—like their resentful master—are insanely jealous of the great
minds in history whose achievements reveal the nakedness of
these present-day mediocrities. It is not surprising, therefore,
that under the spell of Nietzschean derangement the world has
been scandalized at the hatred and violence of the Nietzschean
aggressions. In the fifty or rather almost seventy years since
Nietzsche’s death, the world has been victimized by two major
world wars, scourged by many political, religious, philosoph-
ical, sociological and psychological tyrants who experimented
with man’s soul and body in an unending series of techniques
of degradation. And the new techniques being developed to
remake man bode far greater doom for the future.

What is the remedy against the Nietzschean curse? How can
mankind be liberated from the legion of Nietzsche’s devils?
Oddly enough and by implication only, Nietzsche suggests the
remedy. A noble youth is meditating sadly in the forest, when
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes upon him. In the ensuing con-
versation, the youth breaks down and confesses with violent
gestures and bitter tears the sickness that tortures his soul: “It
is the envy of you that has destroyed me.” But Zarathustra-
Nietzsche embraces the youth and leads him away towards
love. It was his envy of Jesus that destroyed Nietzsche. It is its
envy of Jesus that is destroying a world that is following Nietz-
sche. The daring, resentful refusal of Christ must end in the
madness of chaos. The remedy is for man to be led back to the
love of Christ. To embrace Jesus is to embrace sanity and sanc-
tity. Dostoevsky, prophet and contemporary of Nietzsche,
proves to be a herald of healing to mankind. He analysed the
sickness of modernity so well that he was capable of prescrib-
ing its only effective remedy. “We continually go astray, if we
have not Christ and His Faith to guide us.” “Repudiate Christ
and the human mind can arrive at the most astounding conclu-
sions.”® “The West has lost Christ, that is why it is dying; that
is the only reason.”™

Salvation, peace, truth, freedom and love lie far above and

63. Feodor Dostoevsky, Notebooks 1879, Journal Of An Author, 1873.
64. Feodor Dostoevsky, Notebooks, 1871.

Nietzsche: God Becomes Superman 91

beyond Nietzschean madness. They can be experienced only in
Christian mystery, beyond atheism which is the narrowest
auto-erotic imprisonment, in Faith which is the self-donating
openness to the infinite Love of the Absolute Thou. And Dosto-
evsky directs us to the most unerring way to that Faith:

This profession of faith is very simple. This is what it is:
to believe that there is nothing finer, deeper, more lovable,
more reasonable, braver and more perfect than Christ;
and, not only there is nothing, but, I tell myself with a
jealous love, there cannot be anything.®

What a strange paradox! Nietzsche’s jealous love which re-
jected Christ, led on to madness. Dostoevsky’s jealous love
which embraced Christ led on to gladness.

65. Henri Troyat, Dostoievski (1940), pp. 235-236.

CHAPTER IV

é
Da
K
Da

Marx: Cosmic Classless
Society Becomes God

ON OCTOBER 25, 1967, ATHEISTIC COMMUNISM CELE-
brated the fiftieth anniversary of its revolution and coming to
power in Russia. From a handful of Bolsheviks who in. 1917
toppled the Kerensky Provisional Government and seized con-
trol of the Russian State, led by Lenin and Trotsky, a colossal
hegemony had evolved through five decades to that moment of
the golden jubilee. From Russia, where the great Marxist ex-
periment began, communism spread quickly everywhere,
penetrating into every advanced nation and backward region,
acquiring the reins of government in many nations and leaven-
ing with the spirit of revolt every major social organization. No
political, academic, religious, economic or major professional
movement has escaped its attentions and influence.

Indeed, today more than one billion persons are ruled by gov-
ernments that openly profess and practice the doctrine of
Marx. And millions of other persons are ruled by governments
that fearfully sway to the winds of communist policies. In an

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 93

age of unprecedented and proliferating crises, there is scarcely
a turmoil anywhere in the world in which the catalyzing power
of communism may not be discovered. Atheistic communism is
a sword of division; it cuts asunder families, communities, na-
tions, empires. It has, indeed, succeeded, directly or indirectly,
by action or example, in keeping the world in a state of military
conflict since its seizure of power in 1917.

Fifty years of continuous international drama! Fifty years of
sustained, national and international, barbaric terrorism! Fifty
years of civil wars in all parts of the world! Fifty years of
internal and international intrigue and conspiracy! Fifty years
of now charging, now creeping—but always advancing—total-
itarian tyranny!

As we view today this recent calamitous milestone, a reflec-
tion on the future seems appropriate. What will be the destiny
of ravished Holy Mother Russia in the next fifty years? What
the future of the submerged Christian nations of Eastern
Europe? Will China fight free from the twisting, crushing coils
of the communist serpent? Will communist Cuba metastasize
its cancer and infect the whole of Latin America? Will atheistic
communism continue its triumphant march through humanity
and history, branding permanently with hammer and sickle
the Middle East, Europe, America and the whole world? Or
ought we predict the collapse of communism from within?
From an explosion of the unbearable pressures below? From a
silent, gentle erosion of bureaucratic rigidity into pluralistic
pliability? Or will this monstrous monolith have to be demol-
ished from without? Delendus est Communismus!

The leaders of communism give a dogmatic answer to all
these questions. Their system of thought and power is here to
stay; it is guaranteed irreversible and final victory by the neces-
sary, one-directional process of dialectical history. This is the
main article of incontrovertible faith for all communists. Men
will necessarily—some even willingly—continue to liberate
themselves from non-communist exploitation through revolu-
tion and evolution until they arrive at the promised land of the
classless society. The Party, headquartered in Moscow, will
lead the world through its fighting proletariat to the commu-
nist messianic millenium. And in order to spur History on in its
mission to the classless millennium, the Party has assembled

94 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

and trained the world’s greatest, most awesome military ma-
chine, assuring all men inevitable passage by land, sea and
space to its earthly Jerusalem.

What is the secret of this most successful of revolutions?
What inner, vital dynamism has driven it beyond merely Rus-
sian boundaries, or even European borders, to its world-wide
dimensions? How has this unique revolution, conceived in the
West, spawned its progeny so explosively in all sections of the
world and in such widely diverse civilizations? How has this
revolutionary humanism, cradled in Christianity, developed
into the most terrifying, efficient, heartless Movement for
Atheism the world has ever seen? A study of its spiritual origins
and historical growth is essential for all believers—especially
Christians—who will have to become seriously eager to under-
stand the causes, nature and goals of this contemporary mon-
ster, if they are to fulfill their mission to lead their society in
these times through Christ to God. This chapter will focus on
the spiritual beginnings of communism with a concentration
on kow and why this crusading movement insists on being
atheist in a militantly practical way and on forcing all men into
its godless program.

German Philosophy: Cradle of Communism

Since the way things develop is greatly determined by the
way they began, a study of Karl Marx’s early life and family
milieu will enlighten us as to the forces that helped mold his
person and inspire his profession. Marx was born on May 5,
1818, in the little Rhenish town of Trier, distinguished as a
Roman outpost in early times. He was bilaterally descended
from a long line of Jewish rabbis. His father, Hirschel, in order
to be able to pursue his legal profession successfully and his
family life peacefully, had himself and his family baptized
Christian. The family lived as very liberal Protestants, that
is, without any profound religious beliefs. Thus, Karl grew
up without any inhibiting consciousness of himself as being
Jewish. In changing his credal allegiance, of course, the
father, newly baptized Heinrich, experienced the alienation
of turning his back on his religious family traditions. Thus,
though politically emancipated and socially liberated from the

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 95

ghetto, the experience of being uprooted and not completely at
home in the Germany of the nineteenth century did affect the
Marx family. Calvez, commenting on the situation of aliena-
tion, writes:

One must be on one’s guard against wishing to explain
Marx wholly by his Jewish origins, as some recent anti-
semites and philo-semites have actually attempted. If
Marx was not ignorant of the problem of the emancipation
of the Jews, he, nevertheless, did not attach any impor-
tance to it as an isolated problem. Quite simply, he related
it to the more general and more fundamental problem of
the emancipation of maz. [Italics in original.] However,
his Jewish origins, which made him an uprooted person,
did predispose Marx to perceive with a very lively con-
sciousness the alienations of man. Moreover, the univer-
salism and radicalism of his solutions can be tied in with
these origins.

Thus, in a family atmosphere that was avowedly rationalist
and Kantian, where Voltaire and Rousseau were staple reading,
the young Marx grew up in a climate of freedom from religion
as naturally as he grew up in his physical body. Thus, in the
beginning at least, he was, in a manner of speaking, a natural
born atheist. There was no hostility or ostentatiousness about
his atheism, such as will certainly be present later in the mili-
tant atheism of Lenin. Marx was simply another verification of
the well-known aphorism: Tel père, tel fils. After a brilliant
career at school, Marx briefiy attended the University of Bonn
and then the University of Berlin where his intellectual en-
thusiasms were concentrated on law, philosophy and theology.
After he earned a doctoral degree on the basis of a thesis on the
Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus, Marx turned to-
wards political journalism. He was made editor of the Rkein-
ische Zeitung, which was quickly suppressed because of its
advanced, revolutionary views. Marx and the other “Young
Hegelians” whom he had met in Berlin were agreed that philos-
ophy, if it were to achieve its ends, must realize itself in the
practical sphere of politics and the reform of the state. Marx,
therefore, belonged to that generation of great, intellectual,

1. Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965),
p. 21. Translation from the French by the author.

96 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

cosmopolitan, rationalist Jews whose company boasted such
geniuses as Heine and Borne.

Karl Marx received the keys to his communist kingdom from
his German masters Hegel and Feuerbach. Hegel gave him the
keys of the unhappy conscience and the dialectical method of
analyzing history. History, according to Hegel, is the contradic-
tory unfolding of Reason itself from less to more rational
forms, to the utmost rational form of existence—fully self-con-
scious Thought—God Himself. Here was a comprehensive sys-
tem of philosophy which set the dialectical method to work
explaining the whole gamut of cosmic and communitarian
problems. The philosopher, hitherto a passive contemplative,
was now challenged by the Hegelian enterprise to become an
active participant in history. His new task was to discover truth
in events rather than in theories. In his own philosophy Marx
called this new process the principle of the “unity of theory and
practice.” Abstract speculation yielded to active participation
in the “progressive development” of the “entire human race”
as the source of “real positive knowledge about the world.”2
Knowledge was thus linked inseparably to historical action by
Hegel’s followers. But Marx, his most famous follower, inter-
preted this action to be revolutionary action, the sole way of
development for matter and man. Thus the Hegelian philoso-
phical impulse to give a scientific analysis of history became
the Marxian revolutionary action to create history. The philos-
opher was now called upon to be not only more than a thinker,
that is, a doer; he was also called upon to be a revolutionary.
“The philosophers,” wrote Marx, “have only izterpreted the
world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”*

Ludwig Feuerbach, with the publication of his The Essence
Of Christianity, supplied Marx with the key of a humanist,
materialistic humanism. By revealing God to be the “fictitious”
creation of man’s sick conscience, Feuerbach denied the reality
of God, of any transcendent, of spirit. He argued that God did
not create man but that man created God out of his warped
imagination. Hence only matter, nature and man exist. And
man is to regain his own glory by knowing and controlling

2. Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy” (1886), in Marx And Engels: Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1955), Vol. II, p. 364.

3. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) op. cit, p. 404.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 97

matter, of which he himself is the highest product. Marx ea-
gerly accepted Feuerbach’s proposition that everything is ulti-
mately nothing but matter. He thereby rejected Hegel’s
interpretation of history as the unfolding of the Absolute Mind,
the ultimate spiritual reality. Combining Hegel’s progressive
dialectic with Feuerbach’s radical materialism, Marx con-
cluded that man, himself the real supreme being, was capable
of discovering the laws of history in the unfolding material
conditions of society. Truth is the process of material change.
Consequently, the thinking man must seek to revolutionize the
entire economic order of society. Thus the human enterprise
began to take on the thrilling aspects of a social crusade for the
Young Hegelians of the Left with the inspiration sparked by the
reading of Feuerbach’s thesis. On the liberating effect of Feuer-
bach’s thesis, Engels writes:

Then came Feuerbach’s Essence Of Christianity. With
one blow it pulverized the contradiction, in that without
circumlocution it placed materialism on the throne again
... Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher
beings our religious fantasies have created are only the
fantastic reflection of our own essence... One must have
himself experienced the liberating effect of this book to
get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became
at once Feuerbachians.‘ . .. With irresistible force Feuer-
bach is finally driven to the realization ... that our con-
sciousness and thinking, however suprasensuous they
may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the
brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is
merely the highest product of matter."

A genius in his own right, Marx minted a few keys to his own
kingdom. He was dissatisfied with the cult of abstract man as
found in his otherwise acceptable Feuerbachian materialism.
Humanity, Feuerbach’s new abstract deity for man, Marx re-
placed with the science of real men and their historical devel-
opment. From now on the new social philosophy would
concentrate on the materialism of economic problems and soci-
ological situations. Socialism was the necessary outcome of the

4. Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,”
op. cit, Vol. II, pp. 366, 367.
5. Engels, loc. cit., p. 371.

98 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

conflict between two classes—the powerful bourgeoisie and the
rising proletariat. At the heart of every antagonism, matter, the
sole reality in the universe, was essentially in motion, progress-
ing inevitably upward in a spiralling direction and constituting
man’s evolution and history. Man by his work eventually will
resolve the conflict in the millenium of communist society.
While engaging in this process, man becomes the creator of his
world, his history, himself. Marx’s materialism, in speaking
about the origin and nature of all existing things, claims that
things have not been created, but everything is in essence mat-
ter and matter-in-motion. Applied to history and human affairs,
materialism means that the basis of all human endeavors is
found in man’s material existence. Society is the social produc-
tion of material life solely, an economic production. Thus
Marx’s application of this theory to the explanation of history
is called “historical materialism.”

On Marx’s rejection of God as creator of the world and accep-
tance of the primacy of evolutionary matter, Engels, Lenin and
even Stalin grafted Hegel’s dialectical method. For Marx him-
self did not go beyond historical materialism. He does not give
us in his writings a complete exposition of his theory of knowl-
edge, that is, of the dialectical method as such. For the nature
of the dialectical method and its function in history we must go
back to Hegel, Engels and Lenin. Now what is dialectic? The
term in its modern meaning originates in Hegel. It is a philoso-
phy stating that all reality is in continuous flux; that there are
no immutable eternal truths and consequently no science of
metaphysics that studies stable essences and eternal things.
Rather, change is eternal and proceeds by opposites opposing
each other. Progress is impossible without struggle. Dialectic is
the struggle that leads to the enrichment of reality, for in every
clash of beings there is hidden the meaning of a unity on a
higher level of being. Dialectical struggle, therefore, is far
more fruitful than a static metaphysics because it allows for an
unlimited progress in knowledge, in being, in history. Now the
dialectic process is not merely an exterior technique for
manipulating being; it is intrinsic to being, thinking, evolving
reality. It is the unity of the content and the form of being.
Whatever exists is essentially challenged by its opposite; the
world moves ahead in this necessary clash of negations. Thus

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 99

dialectics is equated to the science of the general laws of mo-
tion, both of the external world and of human thought. Engels
clearly reveals the nature of the Marxian dialectic in the fol-
lowing passage:

s

... The old metaphysics . . . accepted things as finished
objects . . . this dialectical philosophy dissolves all concep-
tions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of
humanity corresponding to it. For it (dialectical philoso-
phy) nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transi-
tory character of everything and in everything: nothing
can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of
becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendency
from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy
itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this pro-
cess in the thinking brain.®

Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer, professor of political science at the
University of Notre Dame, gives the following useful summary
of the nature and function of the dialectic. “In considering
everything a connected and integral whole, dialectics places
the emphasis entirely on society as a whole matter than on the
individual person. In stressing the changeability of everything,
dialectics considers as more real that which is expected to
come than that which now exists. In insisting on the rapid and
abrupt nature of change, dialectics points to the inevitability
of violent revolutions. And the concept of contradictions puts
forward the idea of struggle.””

Thus, dialectical materialism is seen as the essential union
between materialism and dialectics. Material conditions, so-
cial conditions, historical conditions are conceived as inces-
santly changing according to the dialectical laws. Marx and
Engels eradicated from their materialism the limitations of
all previous materialism. Dialectical materialism was free
from being “predominantly mechanical,” non-historical, non-
dialectical, i.e., metaphysical in the static sense. Moreover,
dialectical materialism, unlike its antique species, adhered
consistently and comprehensively to the viewpoint of develop-

6. Ibid., Vol. Il, p. 362.

7. Gerhart Niemeyer, Facts On Communism, Vol. I: The Communist
Ideology, United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1960), p. 130.
(Italics in original)

100 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ment. It no longer regarded the human essence abstractly but
as an “ensemble” of concretely defined historical, social. rela-
tions. Old materialism merely interpreted the world from one
static viewpoint; dialectical materialism changed and im-
proved the world by its “revolutionary, practical-critical, ac-
tivity.”®

Claiming to be able to know all reality through the key of
dialectical materialism, communism asserts that it is, there-
fore, a true “science.” Perhaps Marx’s central doctrine in what
he called “scientific socialism” is the idea that the laws of the
change of social conditions can be fully known and even accu-
rately predicted through the materialistic analysis of society.
As a prophet, therefore, Marx predicted that capitalism, with
its bourgeois superstructured society, would inevitably disap-
pear and be replaced by a Communist Utopia founded on
proletarian rule. Subsequent and modern history have proved
Marx an unreliable prophet. Moreover, since it is founded on
a priori dogmas which it steadfastly refuses to subject to scien-
tific experimentation and analysis, communism fails to meet
the valid criteria of a science; it proceeds by unscientific meth-
ods. Its overweening claim to eventual omniscience can, there-
fore, be interpreted solely as a blind faith in the infinite powers
of the human mind.

Atheism and Communist Humanism

As we have seen, Marx enthusiastically accepted Feuer-
bach’s criticism that God is man’s own invention and that noth-
ing lies beyond matter. After Feuerbach, “the criticism of
religion is substantially complete,’”® claimed Marx. His “in-
spired demonstration” is irrefutable. For Marx and his follow-
ers atheism became henceforth an established dogma. Marx
himself never bothered proving it theoretically again. Hence-
forth, his main concern was persuading men to undertake a life
of practical, scientific atheism. Though rejecting his master’s
abstract man, Marx applied his godless, materialistic criticism

8. Lenin, “Karl Marx” (1914), Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
Ltd., 1939), Vol. XI, pp. 15, 16.

9. Karl Marx, Toward The Critique Of Hegel's Philosophy Of Right in Marx
& Engels: Basic Writings, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (New York: Doubleday,
Anchor Books, 1959), p. 262.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 101

to concrete, individual man who is engaged in changing the
world, creating industry, building society and making history.

With God effectively obliterated from reality through that
“inspired demonstration,” the critique of religious alienation,
the highest being then enthroned in the universe becomes man.
For Marx, man fills the vacuum created by the absence of God.
Man becomes the only reality, the only meaning of the uni-
verse, of evolution, of history. Man, liberated from the divine
shackle, is now free to create himself fully in solidarity with
his fellow men. Not abstract man, not the man of the philoso-
phers, but the existential individual, nay, to be more precise,
the worker. The whole being of the individual man exists in his
work. By his work man raises himself above his natural state
of animality. By his work man conquers raw nature and adapts
the cosmos to himself. By his work man creates the conditions
he needs for self-advancement. Man is the creation of man by
man; man is the producer of maturing man; man is his own
savior. The essence of man consists in his being a worker. And
his work not only snaps the divine shackle, but also breaks the
cosmic chains that have hitherto held him back and down in
utter frustration. For it is to his work that man owes his own
origin; it is the principle of all creative power, the cause of
history and whatever is human in the world. To be sure, this
human omnipotence and creativity can be achieved only in a
communist society. For there alone will one find the total pro-
cess of activity radiating solely from the proletariat and di-
rected by the fullest exercise of liberty.

We have here a practical humanism which is at once pure
atheism, a quasi-divine naturalism and total revolutionism.
Work, the essence of man’s being, rips man suddenly, violently,
irrevocably from God, from the transcendent and from the ex-
isting bourgeois world with all its forms of self-alienation.
Work, man’s greatest form of revolution, seeks to restore the
divinity of man. The condition of slavery imposed by the three
tyrants mentioned above—God, supernaturalism and capital-
ism—is vividly described by Marx:

The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion,
religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the
self-consciousness and self-feeling of man, who either has

102 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.
But man is no abstract being, squatting outside the world.
Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this
society produce religion, a perverted world consciousness,
because they are a perverted world. Religion is the gen-
eral theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium,
its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’hon-
neur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn com-
pletion, its universal ground for consolation and justifica-
tion. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence
because the kuman essence has no true reality. The strug-
gle against religion is therefore mediately the fight
against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual
aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of
real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heart-
less world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation.
It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as
the illusory happiness of the people is required for their
real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about
its condition zs the demand to give up a condition which
needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in
embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which
is religion.” (Italics in the original).

If, according to Marx, “the criticism of religion is the premise
of all criticism,” then atheism is established by him as the
major premise, the seminal proposition for a communist hu-
manism. And if in the beginning is the revolution against God
as man’s first creative work, then the communist program
must progress from this initial liberation to the final self-
glorification of man. This ultimate victory over a hitherto hos-
tile cosmos and community will inevitably be attained and
celebrated only through man’s dedication to revolutionary
work. It becomes evident, then, that precisely because and, in
as much as it is a humanism, communism is necessarily an
atheism. Atheism is not an accidental accretion to communist
humanism. It is intrinsic and essential to both its creed and
conduct. Atheism is as inseparable from a vital communism as
the soul is inseparable from a living man. Atheism is the re-
verse side of communist humanism.

10. /bid., pp. 262-263.
11. Ibid., p. 262.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 103

Marx gives us another indication of his radical atheism when
he writes: “The profane existence of error is discredited after
its heavenly oratio pro aris et locis has been rejected.”!2 Even
so it follows that the profane existence of injustice, exploita-
tion, classes, governed, owners, ignorant, guilty, sick will like-
wise be destroyed after their heavenly refuge has been
rejected. The first act of human amelioration, because it is the
first act of human liberation, must always be the cry: “There is
no God!” Yet the denial and dissolution of religious myths are
mere sterile abstractions in themselves. They must be rendered
fruitful by their incarnation into a positive program of work
that will be enacted by the proletarian revolution for the estab-
lishment of all men in the solidarity of the communist society.
Work is the complementary, creative power that makes the
religious revolution meaningful. Work is the emancipating
force that creates a society in the future in which man will no
longer be subordinate, as a despised inferior, to an exterior,
superior community. Work transforms the isolated individual
of bourgeois society into the social man of communist human-
ism. Work renders man capable of developing all his powers to
their fullest capacities; it perfects his whole nature; it inserts
him organically, as equal among equals, into the classless com-
munity of concord.

But the attainment of this millenium will be the work of ages.
It will have to be achieved through much suffering, after many
set-backs; it will be the product of dialectical disasters and
achievements on the way to certain revolutionary success.
After all, Prometheus, the Titan and model of Marxist man,
succeeded in discovering the arts and crafts for man’s salvation
only after he revolted against the gods crying: “I hate all the
gods.” And when he was punished by Father Zeus, Prometheus,
far from being repentent and subordinate, answered Hermes,
the servant of the gods, in these defiant words: “Be assured of
this, I will never exchange my miserable lot for your servitude.
I prefer to be riveted to this rock than to be the servile valet or
errand boy of Father Zeus.” “Prometheus,” says Marx in his
doctoral thesis where he utilizes this myth of human greatness,

12. bid., p. 262 (Prayer for the altars and hearths.)

13, Aus Dem Literarischen Nachlass Von K. Marx, F. Engels Und F. Lassalle,
(From The Literary Heritage of K. Marx, F. Engels und F. Lassalle), compiled
by F. Mehring (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1902), Vol. 1, p. 68.

104 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

“is the first saint, the first martyr on the calendar of philoso-
phy.” Earlier, in 1837, he had written his father, “A curtain
has fallen; my sanctuary has been demolished and it has be-
come necessary to set up new gods there.” In the same letter
Marx indicated the new horizon for his vision: “Abandoning the
idealism which I had met and cherished in Kant and Fichte, I
discovered that the idea existed in the real itself. If the gods had
formerly lived above the earth, they now became its center.”!®
The whole Marxian project has been the verification of this
new humanism.

Only the Promethean adventure with its audacious style
could overthrow the oppressive society, already for ages deeply
entrenched in power. Idealist, optimist solutions were power-
less against feudalism, religion and capitalism which, aided by
the connivance of religious and political powers, had buried the
true nature of man under a gigantic superstructure, of eco-
nomic and political tyranny. It will be the task of organized
workers in this period of man’s pre-history—the time before
the advent of communist society—to tear down these prehis-
toric empires. The act of religious revolution is the first act of
human history. It gives meaning to the history of man because
it restores man to his greatness and to himself. Whatever
events preceded the revolution against God and the reigning
oppressive societies were not the history of man; they were the
records of branded herds of animals, the pre-history of pre-
man. History begins, therefore, with the denial of God and ad-
vances through the revolutionary destruction of bourgeois
society to the enthronment of man as his own god in the com-
munist community. Man is born and projected into history by
his act of revolt against God, his “I will not serve!”

We indicated earlier that Marx’s communism was the philo-
sophical child of Hegel’s dialectic and Feuerbach’s humanistic
materialism. Engels, close associate of Marx for many years,
joined these two in a metaphysical marriage. Following He-
gel’s lead, he contended that being moves in history only by
virtue of the contradiction that sets being against itself, against
other being and against the threat of non-being. For Marx, be-

14. Ibid., p. 68. g
15. Écrits De Marx Et De Engels À L’exception Du Capital, edited by V.
Adoratsky, (Moscow: 1931), Vol. 1, section ii, p. 213.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 105

ing is matter; being is godless. These propositions are convert-
ible. Now dialectical materialism advances unconsciously up
through inanimate nature, through plant and animal king-
doms, into the resentfully conscious stage of master-slave di-
chotomy. It conquers the primitive, feudalistic, capitalistic
alienations of pre-history man and culminates with final vic-
tory in the solidarity of social man in the communist society.

In this dialectical adventure the new meaning of man eradi-
cates man’s previous lust for possessing things. Being, creating,
producing replaces having. Indeed, man divests himself of the
exclusive relationship of having by a dialectical act of self-
denial. His passion now is to be involved in community and
communion with things and other men solely for the sake of his
fellow man, as a member of the social solidarity of communist
humanism. In his Holy Family Marx describes the new human
meaning and relationship thus:

Each of his human connections with the world: seeing,
listening, feeling, tasting, touching, thinking, reflecting,
being moved, willing, being active, loving, in summary, all
the organs of his individuality, all, as organs which are
immediately and formally communitarian, are in their
objective productiveness or in their intercourse with the
object the assimilation of it.1*

Such is the Marxist high ground for human achievement. In
his dialectical intercourse with the other—be it nature or other
men—man creates and discovers himself as a social being
within this dynamic intercourse. His history, his being, his so-
ciety are created in the evolutionary process and social com-
merce which now constitute his reality. There is no such reality
as an already established, static, universal human essence to
which man ought to aspire. Each individual human essence is
created and forged in the fires of dialectical materialism. Each
individual becomes by his own efforts an existential, phenom-
enological essence. Man is not given a definition. Each man
achieves his substantive meaning. No other being can define
man. Nothing beyond him, for the transcendent has already
been proven to be non-existent. Nothing below him, for man is

16. Karl Marx, Sainte Famille, translation Molitor, Oeuvres Philosophiques,
(Paris: 1927), Editions Costes, Vol. 1, p. 51.

106 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the apotheosis of evolving matter and the work of his own
efforts. Man is, therefore, his own immanent, dialectic move-
ment and definition. He is his own goal and god. This glorifica-
tion of man is the goal of Marxist, atheistic humanism.
From another viewpoint, perhaps the major impact of He-
gel’s thought on Marx was its insight into the essentially active,
essentially contradictory and hostile relation between thought
and matter, between man and the world, between man and
man. As we have already seen, the vision of man as a finite
being in the process of becoming somehow infinite through his
struggle against nature and society led Marx to develop what
he called “scientific socialism,” his science of society and his-
torical development. Marx had great respect for the agonizing
process of genesis. From the crucible of this process, Marx
contended, feeble man draws a degree of infinite power, knowl-
edge, action, love, even spirit, all purely human achievements,
harvested from his Promethean labors. A mere fragment, a
biologically nude scrap of nature in his origins, man, neverthe-
less, manages to raise himself above natural, animal existence
by his defiant feats. Powerful over, yet ever vulnerable to, na-
ture, separated from, yet ever subordinated to and created by
nature, man finds in this paradoxical conflict the scourge of
both his freedom to create himself and his world and his neces-
sity to submit to a social determinism that sweeps him along
through many uncontrollable tragedies to his final humanism.
Little by little man dominates nature; conversely and simul-
taneously, nature gradually determines him and his destiny.
The concrete realization of his humanity is forged by the deter-
minism of the dialectical process. Yet man himself is not that
determinism. Man becomes human only by first having suff-
ered and passed through what is inhuman. Subjected to the
brutality of biological nature, man responds with his own
forms of brutality against nature—his systems of law, moral-
ity, economics, religion. Each contradiction resolved, each
class struggle synthesized—be it between master and slave,
lord and serf, capitalist and worker—sees man advance to a
higher degree of human maturity. The laws of history that
govern the evolution of human society demand that man be
created, not out of the slime of the earth, but out of the brutality
of man’s inhumanity to man. Out of the fires of his cosmic and

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 107

class struggles, man, the creator of his own history, will inexo-
rably bring forth his future utopia—communist humanism. Yet
this integral humanism will be real, not ideal, for it has already
been conceived, it is presently being gestated and will eventu-
ally be born from the womb of the proletarians’ tragedies. Writ-
ing of the spiritual nature of this integral humanism, de Lubac
gives this perceptive analysis:

Marx’s doctrine, never plain naturalism, always paid as
much attention to man’s spiritual life as to his material
existence. His communism offered itself as the only con-
crete realization of humanism; it quite deliberately
claimed to be a total solution for the whole human prob-
lem; moving to the plane of reality, it did not propose to
figure there only as a social phenomenon but as a spiritual
phenomenon also. This is what gives it greatness, but this
is also the radical flaw in it; it is this that bathes even its
sound elements in a baneful atmosphere and it is this that
Chiefly arouses Christian opposition. “The religion of the
workers has no God,” Marx wrote in a letter to Hardmann,
“because it seeks to restore the divinity of man.”?”

Communist Ethics

Marx’s statement on the religion of the workers can be para-
phrased by a parallel proposition on their ethics. The morality
of the workers has no transcendent standard because it seeks
to foster their class struggle. Engels had already stated: “For it
(dialectical philosophy) nothing is final, absolute, sacred.”!*
From this eternal flux of reality, he went on to conclude that
all morality is but the practical struggle, the prolongation into
conduct of each class’s quest for its own interests, “. . . In reality
every class, every profession has its own morality.”!%

Now if nothing is objectively absolute except “the struggle of
mutually exclusive opposites” within the context of historical
materialism, then communist humanisn, in order to justify its
conduct, must discover within this struggle some absolute
moral standard of its own. This it does, making historical expe-

17. Henri de Lubac, S.J., op. cit, p. 17.
18. Engels, op. cit, Vol. II, p. 362.
19. Ibid, p. 383.

108 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

rience the absolute standard of its morality. At first sight this
standard would seem to be very relativistic. But, theoretically
at least, it is not so. Why? Because communist morality imposes
tasks that are absolutë, compulsory and enduring throughout
history. Each moral task arises suddenly and is conditioned by
the historical process and the possibility of the task’s fulfill-
ment against the opposition of superstructured society. Thus
within the turbulent bosom of unfolding history the communist
conscience is endowed with certain rights and burdened with
important duties.

But what of the problem of freedom in the communist enter-
prises? Is deliberately free activity possible in a humanism
seemingly so deterministic? Does the dialectical process de-
velop itself in such a manner as to be ineluctably indifferent to
human action? Is the law of communism such that its auto-
matic working will inevitably destroy capitalism without the
cooperation of man? Or is this doctrine just an ideal proposed
for the contemplation of man’s conscience and the inspiration
of his liberty? May man merely fold his arms and eagerly await
the Eden that historical materialism is inevitably preparing for
him? If the answer to these questions is yes, then both freedom
and morality are suppressed in communist humanism because
impossible of expression in its radical determinism.

Communist teaching rejects the contradictory dilemma of
ideal versus imperturbable determinism. Marx had written in
his The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a stable
state which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will
have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement
which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of
this movement result from the premises now in existence. . .”2°
Thus communist humanism admits of no ideal outside the real,
beckoning man to transcend historical experience. Moreover, it
rejects an imperturbable determinism as this contradicts the
eternal, dialectical flux of its process. What then is the nature
of communism’s ethics? We can probably understand its es-
sence best by comparing it with traditionally accepted morality
in civilized countries.

Western thinkers represent ethics as rooted intrinsically in

20. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1963),
New World Paperback edition, p. 26.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 109

human nature, which is oriented metaphysically toward an
absolute order of values. Both human nature and the absolute
order of values are grounded on the ultimate transcendent Na-
ture and Order—God. As he knowingly and willingly accepts or
rejects this order and its Author, man renders himself morally
good or evil. Now communist humanism rejects the very con-
ception of absolute transcendent standards of morality or un-
conditioned moral actions and obligations. It contends that
there is no eternal truth, values or even beauty. Only that is
true, valued and beautiful which the test of historical experi-
ence designates as so. Again to call this doctrinal and moral
relativism is to say too little against this ethics and to say it
falsely. For communists do not doubt nor are they eclectic
about their moral principles. They know and state apodictically
that neither truth, goodness nor beauty exists beyond human
experience and history. Every attempt to escape the real, his-
torical, human condition towards some form of transcendence
is but an expression of man’s alienation from himself. Tradi-
tional morality is just such a flight and illusory self-alienation
from one’s self. Thus, there are no immutable, transcendent
values for communist humanists. There exist only values and
judgments that are immersed in historical reality. Since his-
torical reality is in constant flux, values are in constant flux;
good and evil are in flux. Lenin writes:

In what sense do we repudiate ethics and morality? In the
sense that they were preached by the bourgeoisie, who
declared that ethics were God’s commandments. We, of
course, say that we do not believe in God...

We repudiate all morality that is taken outside of human,
class concepts...

We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the
interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.”!

Therefore, morally, is not the Supreme Good for communist
humanism this real world which man ought to possess and
dominate fully? Is not the Supreme Good man’s real, concrete
life which he ought to elucidate, organize, suffuse with reason

21. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth League,” (Speech Delivered at the Third
All-Russian Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, Oct. 2, 1920),

in Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1943), Vol. IX, pp. 474,
475, 477.

110 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

and social universality? Thus in communist humanism man
has a very important moral mission, an absolute crusade.
He must enter upon an enterprise which is always new, a
challenge ceaselessly repeated by the dialectic of history.
His task is to resolve contradictions between economic and
social forces, to strike against capitalism, the ruling classes,
the superstructured, bourgeoisie society. This is his absolute
task, limited solely by the exigencies of history, to advance the
social revolution. Through work men are to achieve the supre- `
macy of man over blind chance and exterior cosmic conditions.
History without man’s cooperation is impotent. Marx had
written:

History does nothing; it “possesses no immense wealth;”
it “wages no battles.” It is man, real living man, that does
all that, that possesses and fights; “history” is not a person
apart, using man as a means for zts own particular aims;
history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his
aims...

Moreover, men are not to be selfishly interested in their own
personal development. Rather they are to be dedicated to libe-
rating man from every self-alienation, thereby ushering in the
communist society. Hence all ethical actions are subordinated
to these historical, social goals. To communist humanism,
man’s value is conditional, not absolute; derivative, not ulti-
mate. Hence, individuals, families, particular societies, whole
nations exist for the communist society, not for themselves.
Communist society exists for the production of material goods.
Man is a physical, social part of a greater whole; he is an instru-
ment to an impersonal, material end. Every worker is bound to
dedicate his efforts to this end. No reward or punishment as
such is promised for service or disservice to this cause. But
history threatens man with a fatal alternative: Either commu-
nist society or barbarism. Thus Marx imperiously demands that
man address himself to the moral tasks of subverting the exist-
ing contradiction of capitalism and erecting scientific social-
ism in its place. Here is the field in which man may vigorously
exercise his liberty. The noblest use of human freedom is its

22. Karl Marx, Tke Holy Family (1845) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956),
p. 125.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 111

cooperation with the historical process in transforming the
world, in creating man, in revealing man to himself, in promot-
ing man from being an object and animal to being a social,
mature subject. So much for the scientific theory of communist
morality. Commenting on Marx’s imperious demand that this
ethic be followed and his unscientific justification of it David
Caute remarks:

When writing of actual revolutions, Marx discarded all
pretensions to scientific impartiality. There was no incon-
sistency in this; according to Marx, subjective revolution-
ary passion is at every stage an agent of the historical
process. But one is entitled to ask whether in the mind of
a single man—Marx’s—subjective passion and scientific
analysis can at any point be separated entirely.*

What about communist morality as an art? In practice com-
munist ethics is quite a relative reality. Workers are to respond
to commands that require their conduct to conform instantane-
ously to the shifting, often contradictory, policies of party
strategy. Human virtue is identified with fidelity to the dictates
of the class struggle. Virtue is deduced from the facts and needs
of this struggle. Vice is a failure to adhere to the commands
from above that set the daily strategy. One day an action, e.g.
opposition to Nazi Germany, may be deemed in the interest of
the socialist revolution. It is to be pursued as morally good.
Suddenly, due to the flux of historical events and tensions, a
pact with Nazi Germany may be dictated as the morally good
action. Never mind that the same action is good on one day and
evil on another. The historical necessities of the moment for
the cause of communism are the determining factors of moral-
ity. And since these change rapidly, continually, the communist
faithful must be ready to change suddenly with the shifting
morality, even though these changes may cause severe psycho-
logical shocks in the souls of the comrades. The future of com-
munism, decided by the events of the present and looking to its
progression in history, is the only standard for moral judge-
ments and actions. Morality is to serve the class struggle, which
is another way of saying that ethics is to serve the ceaseless

23. Essential Writings of Karl Marx with an Introduction and Notes by Da-
vid Caute, (London: 1967), A London Panther, p. 229.

112 THE-GODS OF ATHEISM

pursuit of power by communist humanism. Here is the only
cause that justifies human action. With God rejected, with tran-
scendent standards and goals for morality denied, only what
fosters a communist future and a capitalist failure has any
moral value. Wherever they are not in power communists favor
violent change as a forward and “good” movement against
stability as a backward and “evil” condition. Wherever they
are in power communists favor a stable fidelity to the true doc-
trine of Marx as a morally “good” policy against the treason-
ous revisionism of the “evil” liberalizers. Since man’s future,
according to communist humanism, is identified inevitably
with the classless society, then the struggle for a communist
victory justifies any means and any actions taken to further
this absolute, historical cause. In the exercise of his freedom
man is to enjoy unlimited dimensions so long as he observes
this “law of laws,” this first, this greatest, this only moral com-
mandment. Whatever you do in thought, word or deed, do all for
a communist victory under the leadership of the Communist
Party.

In this connection the leadership of the Party, fearing the
spiritual strength of nations whose traditional and Christian
morality is practiced both in private and public life, works
round the clock as silently and surreptitiously as the law of
gravity to break down the moral integrity of the free nations of
the world. Mr. Garth Lean, in his inspiring book Brave Men
Choose, records the Party’s machinations in this matter:

To whose advantage, in this ideological age, is the maxim
that private and public morality have no connection—or
its extension that morality is impractical, even dangerous,
in a democratic statesman? Lenin made it clear years ago
that the preliminary to Communist take-over is the under-
mining of moral standards in the democracies. “Postpone
operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy
makes delivery of the mortal blow inevitable and easy,” he
said, while his friend and Ambassador in Sweden, Mme.
Kollontai, reported: “Immorality in the schools is progress-
ing satisfactorily.”

Such was the normal and successful strategy of world
Communism between the wars. A bishop’s son, who had
become a Communist agent in Scandinavia, told the pre-
sent author and his friends in 1934 that his instructions

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 113

were not to mention Marxism to the youth for some years,
but to encourage heterosexual and homosexual looseness
among them. “When they can no longer say ‘No’ to them-
selves, they will be unable to say ‘No’ to Communism,” he
was told.”

The relationship between moral depravity and espionage is
today generally admitted. Communist spies are especially
trained, according to the Australian Royal Commission on Es-
pionage, “to detect weakness in character, weakness for drink,
blondes, drugs and homosexuality.”** In London, The Sunday
Telegraph, March 25, 1962, reports that “a finishing school for
girl spies” has been set up in East Berlin; the girls are taught
every form of perversion and told they must not hesitate to use
their knowledge to the full. Failure to “fix” important victims
often involves reprisals on their families.*

Perhaps the classic work on the communist plan to exploit
moral depravity as a sure road to conquest of non-communist
nations is The Yenan Way. Written by South American ex-
communist Eudocio Ravines, founder of the Communist Party
in Peru, the work leaves the reader flabbergasted at the
thoroughness and depravity of the leaders of the Communist
conspiracy. Ravines organized the Popular Front in Chile in the
thirties, he acted as one of the Comintern directors of the sec-
ond phase of the Spanish Civil War; he had been a Professor at
the Leninist Academy in Moscow. While he was on a visit to
Moscow in 1935, Stalin personally sent him to be trained by Mao
Tse-tung in methods of infiltration. His book narrates the steps
of his training and how he later used the Yenan method in
South America. In a sort of oral final exam conducted by Mao
himself, Ravines reports what he had learned:

Ithink the Yenan Way envisages a completely new kind of
politics for us. If I understand you, it goes beyond the strict
limits of the working class and poor peasants and the poor-

24. Garth Lean, Brave Men Choose (London: Blandford Press, 1961), Introduc-
tion, pp. xii, xiii.

25. The Report of the Royal Australian Commission On Espionage: pre-
sented September 14, 1955, printed October 1955, pp. 35, 111.

26. An excellent chapter on this matter is to be found in the work co-authored
by Sir Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean, The New Morality, revised and enlarged,
(London: Blandford Press, fifth impression 1965). I am gratefully indebted to
these authors for the matter used here.

114 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

est of the middle class. We must go daringly into other
fields, keep our eyes on the positions we want to win, and
forget everything else; at any price, win friends, sympa-
thizers and servants.

“That, especially that—servants,” screamed Mao. “People
who serve us, through greed, through fear, inferiority, ven-
geance, what have you, but who serve us. Serve the party,
serve the designs of the Comintern, serve the cause of the
revolution. Congratulations, my boy, you have caught the
very essence of the Yenan Way. Now apply it.”?

Mao confided to Ravines that already by 1935 the Communist
Party of China had “won in this way hundreds of officers of
Chiang Kaishek’s army,” snaring them with money, promotion,
power, whatever it took to break their characters. General Ho
Ying-Chin, former Premier of China, ruefully testified to the
effectiveness of the Yenan technique when he reported of the
Kuomintang leaders: “We all loved our country, but many of us
loved our mistresses too; and we never realized until too late
that they were Communists.”2*

Marx founded communist ethics on his pseudo-science of his-
torical materialism. Lenin added an emotional fanaticism as
another source of communist morality by following the radical
immoralism of Nechayev. Eugene Lyons, reviewing five
decades of Communist immorality in his book Workers’ Para-
dise Lost, writes: “Lenin, it is important to recall, had found
Sergei Nechayev, the apostle of absolute immoralism, even
before he found Marx. In 1868, Nechayev wrote his celebrated
Catechism Of A Revolutionist, in which he renounced all
norms of civilized behavior and prescribed every imaginable
depravity in the pursuit of the ideal. It is as fanatic, hate-
packed a document as the human brain has ever produced. The
revolutionist, he wrote, ‘knows only one science, the science of
destruction,’ which does not stop at lying, robbery, betrayal and
torture of friends, murder of his own family. His central dic-
tum, that ‘everything that contributes to the triumph of the
revolution’ is moral, has been echoed by Lenin and his disciples
to this day and, indeed, figures in every communist pronounce-

27. Eudocio Ravines, The Yenan Way (New York: Scribner's, 1951), pp. 113-

163.
28. Garth Lean, Brave Men Choose, Introduction, p. xiv.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 115

ment on morality.”*® Max Eastman writes that “the confluence
of these two streams of thought (Nechayev and Marx) is one of
the greatest disasters that ever befell mankind.’”*°

Communist Atheism Versus Religion

It has been observed by sages throughout the ages that man’s
calloused heartlessness toward his fellow man increases in
proportion to his unconcern about God. Where, therefore,
one would find a militant hatred of God, one should
expect to find an aggressive malevolence against man. History
has proven this dictum to be frightfully true. In the case
of anti-theistic communism, whose hatred of God is well-nigh
pathological, we discover, accompanying its malice, a virtually
satanic ferocity against man. The movement is powered
by and runs on the vehemence of its feud with God. Frus-
trated at being unable to attack God directly, the communists
savagely, barbarically strike at Him in believers. Persecu-
tion of religion, “the war on superstition,” as it is euphemisti-
cally called, is pressed inexorably in word and deed. Marx’s
contempt for religion was incarnated into a delirium of
violent sadism by Lenin, Stalin and their modern successors.
“Every religious idea,” wrote Lenin to Gorky, “every idea of
god, every flirtation with the idea of god is unutterable vileness
... Any person who engages in building a god, or who even
tolerates the idea of god-building, disparages himself in the
worst possible fashion . . .”*! The Godless Society in Russia has
launched five-year plans for the liquidation of religion.
Churches by the thousands have been closed; church bells
melted down for military purposes, icons burned, religious
leaders of every denomination herded into slave camps and
prisons. What little religious practice is still allowed, exists for
propaganda purposes, dominated by patriarchs and priests
picked by the Party, preaching Party doctrine under the guise“
of the Gospel and responsible solely to the Party.

29. Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost (New York: Paperback Library
Inc., 1967), pp. 376-377.

30. Ibid., Paperback Library, p. 377.

31. Lenin, “Letter from Lenin to A. M. Gorky,” Nov. 14, 1913, in Selected
Works, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd., 1939), Vol. XI, pp. 675, 676.

116 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

The cynical exploitation of religion of which Communism is
capable was demonstrated by Stalin during the Second World
War. When Hitler’s armies invaded Russia and more than a
million Russian soldiers defected, donning German uniforms
in the hope of overthrowing their own hated, Godless regime,
Stalin, realizing that communist humanism could never move
his armies to defeat the Germans, shrewdly made religion legal
and respectable again. Crusades against God ceased and were
prohibited; church bells, silent these many years, rang out
again. Holy Mother Russia was appealed to as the only ideal for
which to fight and die. Not Communism! Indeed, the Commu-
nist International was formally dissolved. Far from having any
longer a messianic mission, Communism, Socialism, Bolshe-
vism, recognized as being positive menaces to the very survival
of the nation, were disowned and discarded. Even with these
cynical moves it is doubtful if the Russians would have rallied
to defeat the invader, had not Hitler aided the Stalin ploy on
religion with a colossal, arrogant blunder of his own. With vio-
lent stupidity he frustrated the eager yearning of the Russian
millions for freedom from their ruthless regime and turned
their intense hatred of that regime against the Germans. Hit-
ler’s racist cruelties against the Russian prisoners alerted the
Russian people that there was to be no salvation from commu-
nism in the Nazi camps. Thus, what Stalin and communism
could not effect among the Russian people, Hitler’s cruelty ac-
complished. Shocked by his barbarities and fooled by Stalin’s
machinations about religion, the Russian people stiffened and
fought back, for their homes and Holy Mother Russia, to defeat
the Nazis and, alas, unbeknown to them, to solidify the commu-
nist regime for more than twenty additional years of tyranny
over themselves.

And what is communist humanism’s position on religion to-
day? Its old position, once again openly hostile and thorough
persecution of it. The Reverend Richard Wurmbrand, Evangeli-
cal Minister and refugee from Rumania who spent fourteen
years in communist prisons after World War II for religious
reasons, in testimony before a United States Subcommittee of
the Committee on the Judiciary testified as follows on the ques-
tion of communist exploitation of religion. The date was May
6, 1966.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 117

Mr. Sourwine: ... What has been the policy and practice
of the Communists with respect to religion in the coun-
tries where they have come to power?

Reverend Wurmbrand: They used three great instru-
ments. First of all, the persecution, to make everybody
afraid. They never accepted that they have put anybody in
prison for religious motives. They found always political
motives . . . [There follow two incidents of Christian pas-
tors whose Sunday sermons were twisted into political
crimes. One received a 7, the other a 15 years prison sen-
tence. The testimony continues thus:]

... There has been, secondly, the method of corruption .. .
For the first time in church history the leadership of
churches is dominated by the central committee of an
avowed atheistic power. The central committee of the
party decides who must be patriarch, who must be Baptist
preacher, Pentacostal preacher, and so on. Everywhere
they have found weak men or men with some sin. Those
they have put in the leadership of churches and so you
could hear in our theological seminary in Bucharest the
theology that God has given three revelations—once
through Moses, second through Jesus, and third through
Karl Marx, and so on.

Religion is corrupted from within. Religion has been
widely used, and is still, as the tool of Communist politics.
The priests everywhere had to propagate the collectiviza-
tion of agriculture and everywhere when Communists
have something important to do, knowing the influence
of religion, priests and pastors are put to preach these
things.

Mr. Sourwine: Have the Communists shown themselves
to be opposed only to Christianity, or to all religions?

Reverend Wurmbrand: To all religions. The Jewish reli-
gion has been persecuted just as the Christian religion. In
the prison of Gherla we had a whole room with rabbis who
were in prisons. We had in prison the Moslem priests and
so on.??

32. Communist Exploitation Of Religion, Hearing Before the Subcommit-
tee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other
Internal Security Laws of the Committee on The Judiciary, United States Sen-
ate, Eighty-Ninth Congress, Second Session. Testimony of Rey. Richard Wurm-
brand. May 6, 1966. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office), pp. 12, 13.

118 THE GODS OF ATHEISM
Communist Atheism Versus The Catholic Church

It has been wisely perceived that communist humanism, as
a commitment to godlessness, could only have taken root and
flourished in the enfeebled body of a mankind that had once
been vigorous but became venal in the profession and practice
of Christianity. Indeed the record shows that Marx, with in-
tense bitterness and total dedication, took up his world-shatter-
ing mission in resentful hatred of the heartless Christians
around him whose pagan lives and policies he rejected.
He started from the false premise that wicked Christians are
the fruit of wicked Christianity. His conclusion that Christian-
ity had been tried for eighteen hundred years and had failed
only compounded his original error.** Nevertheless, the de-
cadent Christian nations, whose national and international
lives were truly scandalous, gave Marx in 1847 the weapon he
needed to attack Christianity and organize a movement of
his own to replace it. It seems quite accurate to state that
communist humanism has deliberately formed itself into an
anti-Christian humanism, that is to say, into an anti-religion
religion, an anti-Church Church, an anti-Catholic catholicity,
an anti-Messiah messianism. And communist humanism
rightly sees in the Catholic Church—whose dogma, zeal and
unity it imitates in transposed, secularized forms—the ulti-
mate enemy it must destroy, if its ideology and Eden are to
prevail in the end.

On her part, the Catholic Church, especially in her leader-
ship, the Popes, has certainly recognized clearly the nature and
aims of this militant humanism, even if many of her intellectu-
als have not. For more than one hundred years Popes have been
analyzing and rejecting communism from the viewpoint of
philosophy and Faith, warning not merely their own faithful
but the whole world of the falsity of doctrine and the incredibly
inhuman practices of this pseudo-humanism. As far back as

33. Marx had written in 1847: “The social principles of Christianity have now
had eighteen hundred years to develop and need no further development by the
Prussian consistorial councillors. The social principles of Christianity justified
the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally
know, when necessary now to defend the oppression of the proletariat, al-
though they make a pitiful face over it . . . The social principles of Christianity

are sneakish and the proletariat is revolutionary.” (Karl Marx, On Religion,
London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 83-84.)

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 119

December 28, 1878, while Marx was still alive, Leo XIII stigma-
tized communism as “a deadly pestilence which attacks the
essentials of society and would annihilate it.”*4

The Pope, however, who most often strategically and inci-
sively made onslaughts on communism was Pius XI. In a salvo
of documents which were appeals to the entire world, he seems
to have made it his special service to man to unmask the move-
ment’s drive to dominate mankind and to challenge men to a
renewed Christian commitment as the only efficacious remedy
against the magic of evolutionary materialism. Although
treated in particular sections of documents which were di-
rectly concerned with other social-spiritual problems, commu-
nist humanism is made the sole subject of special analysis and
condemnation in the classic encyclical on its nature, tactics
and goal—Divini Redemptoris (titled in English Atheistic
Communism) published on March 19, 1937.*° We will concen-
trate on this papal document which discusses the prevailing
communism of that day, known as Bolshevism, and which, still
in the ascendency, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary just re-
cently.

As regards Bolshevism’s philosophical theories on reality the
Catholic Church has this critique to make: In maintaining that
matter and its blind, evolutionary forces alone exist and that
society is merely a higher, more complicated form of matter,
formed ineluctably by the necessary laws of nature, Pius XI
declares that this doctrine degrades the intrinsic sociality of
man to being a mere external accretion added to man by the
determinism of the historical process. Moreover, such a doc-
trine reduces man and society, in the infamous phrase of Sta-
lin, to being at best “the most precious capital.” Atheistic,
anti-creationistic, it denies the specific difference between
matter and spirit, body and soul. Dialectical differences alone
exist in the diverse stages of developing matter. Then too, the
survival of the soul after death and the hope of an eternal life
are swept away by this radical materialism. Pius XI continues:
“Communism is by its nature anti-religious and considers reli-
gion to be “the opium of the people” because the religious prin-
ciples which speak of a life beyond the grave prevent the

34. Acta Apostolicae Sedis, Leonis XII, Vol. I, p. 46.
35. See La Pensée de Karl Marx, p. 578, footnote.

120 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

proletariat from pursuing the realization of the Soviet paradise
in this world.”*° Thus, communism denies the reality that man
as a creature is naturally religious, that is, metaphysically de-
pendent totally and always on his creator. It rejects with spe-
cious reasoning the experience that man throughout the ages
is attracted morally and psychologically to God.

As he addresses himself to the doctrine of violent revolution
which derives from the evolutionary, dialectical aspect of
materialism, the Pope condemns it as being unfounded in real-
ity and used as a pretext to justify violent crimes the world
over, but especially in Russia, Mexico and Spain. Admitting
that class differences exist, sometimes too based on resentment
to real injustice, what the Pope condemns communism for in
this matter is that it makes of all differences, good as well as
evil, a principle for setting class against class permanently in
violent hatred. Communism pushes to the point of irrational
frenzy whatever conflicts exist between groups. Its messianic
mission is seized with an all-pervading drive to rot every per-
sonal and social relationship of man. As a result of this meta-
static fury communism perverts the whole of creation,
transforming realism into materialism, economics into social-
ism, humanism into animalism, politics into militarism, reli-
gion into diabolism.

When Pius XI compares the Christian conception of liberty
with that of the communist conception, he boldly asserts that
communism “despoils man of his liberty, the spiritual princi-
ple of moral conduct.” This despoliation is a consequence of its
radical, dialectical materialism which, as we have seen earlier,
rejects Christian morality. For communism denies the dignity
of the individual, his transcendence before the collectivity. The
person has no private, human rights; he is merely a cog, ona
wheel serving the machine of the collectivity. Radical collecti-
vism swallows up the individual and smothers his rights while
suffocating his liberty. Man is a material instrument subjected
totally to the purposes of an equally material collectivity.
Though matter is important to man and society, the person is
a spiritual whole and may not be reduced to his quantitative
aspects. Moreover, the denial of man’s right to private property
and the resources of nature with its means of production is

36. Acta Apostolicae Sedis, Pius XI, Vol. XXIX, pp. 65-106, 1937.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 121

another assault on the liberty and dignity of man. The fact that
abuses in the exercise of this right have led to the unjust ac-
cumulation of massive wealth and the exploitation of the many
by the few is no reason for depriving all men of a fundamental
dimension of dignity and freedom. The solution to malnutrition
is not starvation nor, for that matter, is starvation the solution
to gluttony. Failing to make the clear and happy distinction,
made by Leo XIII, between the right to possess private property
which is personal and the obligation of how to use private prop-
erty which is social, communism would reduce all men to the
nudity of non-ownership. The fundamental trouble is that be-
ing blindly materialistic and narrowly economic, communism
sees in private property the “original sin” of mankind. Such
narrowness extinguishes in man the creative incentive to work
matter into new, resplendent forms and to administer these
forms for the expansion of man’s liberty and welfare.
Finally, in reassessing the communist social doctrine, Pius XI
rejects its teachings on the state and the family. The dictator-
ship of the proletariat is a regime of violence justified by its
end, which is to subdue all organizations and groups which are
not classless. Here is raw political power put inhumanly at the
service of an impossibility—the illusionary abstraction called
the classless society. This power undermines all societies, civic,
business, social, family. For in communist social doctrine the
primary value is placed on economics. All natural and conven-
tional societies are seen merely as emanations of an evolving
economic history. Such societies are to survive or disappear as
they prove useful to the coming economic system of full-blown
communist humanism. As an emanation of economics, the
family exists for the production of goods; there is nothing sa-
cred about it; it has no rights above or against the dictatorship
of the proletariat; all societies derive their existences and func-
tions from the economic level of their historical age. Pius XI
condemns this inhuman, unnatural, pan-economic atheism.
Every communist thesis put forth on the nature and purpose of
creation, man and society is proven to be false not only under
the light of true philosophy but also under the light.of Divine
Revelation. Mankind is, therefore, exhorted to refuse adher-
ence to communist humanism and never to cooperate with spe-
cifically communist programs, for their intentions, means and

122 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ends are evil. Perhaps the most famous and well-known state-
ment of this whole encyclical that sums up succinctly what a
Catholic or any God-fearing person should know and do about
communist atheism is this: “Communism is intrinsically evil
and no one who would save Christian civilization may collabo-
rate with it in any undertaking whatsoever. Those who permit
themselves to be deceived into lending their aid towards the
triumph of communism in their own country, will be the first
to fall victims of this error.”*”

Communist humanism sees in the Catholic Church its arch-
enemy. And it is engaged in an inevitable, unconditional fight
to the death against her. The very essence of the Catholic
Church, her absolute faith in God and total mission to
humanity, is the cause of communism’s enraged attack upon
her. The Catholic Church professes the same truths that domi-
nated the entire consciousness of her founder, Jesus Christ. She
works zealously as the incarnate prolongation of his presence
and sacramental succession, or rather, application of His salva-
tion until the end of time. Her faith comprises, in the words of
her founder, “all things that I have heard from my Father
which I have made known to you.”** Her mission in His words
is: “My meat is to do the will of him who sent me.” “I am come
that they may have life and may have it more abundantly.” As
did her founder, so too the Catholic Church claims absolutely
the whole man—motives, thinking, loving, dying—for God. She
challenges every man to enlist in Christ’s society here and to
work now for his own and his neighbor’s salvation in that so-
ciety hereafter.

Communist society lives by an equally radical but contra-
Catholic faith and mission. Its faith and enterprise are the
same as that which blazed in the lives of its founders, Marx and
Lenin. They professed wholeheartedly Feuerbach’s basic
dogma: Homo homini Deus: Man is his own God. Moreover,
their equally absolute mission demands the allegiance of the
entire man. Communist humanism invites every man to dedi-
cate his whole life to a crusade which is intensely anti-God in
its negative thrust. In its positive work, the communist crusade

37. Pius XI, Atheistic Communism (Rome: 1937).
38. John 15 : 15.
39. John 4: 34.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 123

divinizes man through its revolutionary attainment of eco-
nomic freedom in its classless society—a utopia that is forever
locked securely in a time-space-matter evolution. Thus, it is
clear that an implacable impasse exists between the Catholic
Church and Communist Humanism. On essential doctrines
concerning God, man, human society an unbridgeable chasm
yawns between them. We are reminded of the deadlock that
existed between Christ and His contemporary enemies, since
the reasons expressed by Christ for that stand-off are identical
here. “You are from below, I am from above. You are of this
world, I am not of this world.’”*° “My kingdom is not of this
world.’’*! The Catholic Church, therefore, sees communist hu-
manism as a contra-truth, a contra-society, a quasi contra-
church fighting against her relentlessly in a total war for the
allegiance of each human person.

Unless communist humanism is recognized to be essentially
and irrevocably anti-Catholic, not merely anti-religious or even
anti-Christian, it will never be profoundly understood. This hu-
manism proposes a directly opposite dogma for each doctrine
the Catholic Church teaches. For whatever solutions the Catho-
lic Church advances to various problems, communism pro-
poses diametrically contrary remedies. The Catholic Church
teaches that she can be recognized by her distinguishing marks;
she is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. The communist quasi
contra-church claims as her distinctive qualities that she is
one, anti-theistic, universal and Marxist. Both organizations
arouse heroic zeal in their finest faithful; both pursue mes-
sianic goals—secularized classless society for communism in
time, divinized, sacramental society for the Catholic Church in
time and into eternity. The direct opposition between the two
societies runs from the dogma to dogma confrontation, through
the diametrically opposed moralities and final ends. Yet, com-
munist humanism, as the upstart newcomer, apes the Catholic
Church with the calculated intention of transposing the
Church’s sacred doctrines and practices into its own atheistic
teachings and profane rules for conduct.

We will, for the most part, restrict ourselves here to the doc-
trinal confrontation between the two societies. Communist hu-

40. John 8 : 23.
41. John 18 : 36.

124 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

manism teaches that man is his own origin; the Church teaches
that God alone is His own non-causal origin. Communism cre-
ates man in socialist society as a “passion for his fellow man;”
communist social man identifies himself with others in the
strict meaning of that word, for he conquers the differences of
alienation, objectification and personality by raising himself to
the solidarity of revolutionary socialist society. Catholicism,
however, teaches that such an identity of nature across differ-
ences is possible only in the Holy Trinity where each divine
Person possesses the identically same divine nature while pre-
serving His unique personality. Communism succumbs to the
tempation to be like God, desiring to know all things, good and
evil. For it claims that communist man, by suppressing all dif-
ferences, attains perfect self-knowledge and perfect equality
with all men. But Catholicism insists that perfect, transparent
self-knowledge, perfect equality with other persons is found,
once again, only in the Blessed Trinity. And man cannot be
equated with God, claim the Christians. For how explain the
chilling limitation of death and man’s inability to escape it?
Indeed, man’s desire to know all and his enterprise to become
God on his own terms is what introduced death by way of pun-
ishment into the human family.

Only in the Trinity is it possible for perfect identity to exist
simultaneously with perfect otherness. The Father is eternally
begetting the Son in perfect self-knowledge; the Father and Son
are eternally breathing forth the Spirit in mutually infinite
love. One identical divine nature is possessed by three perfectly
diverse yet equal persons. Communist humanism teaches that
the identity with man in perfect self-knowledge and perfect
mutual love is fulfilled in socialist society through its perfec-
tion of man’s passion for man. It is man, then, who confers upon
himself infinite lucidity concerning himself and his society
while also exercising absolute liberty in loving himself and this
society. Now the Catholic Church teaches that metaphysically
man is unable to confer anything upon himself; he is created
gratuitously by God out of pure love. Being, existence, powers
of activity, all is conferred upon him as gift; a creature, man is
totally at every instant dependent on his creator. Certainly, he
is obliged to know, love and be grateful for himself and others
in whom he will fulfill his noblest aspirations. “What do you

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 125

have, O Man, that you have not received? And if you have
received it, why do you glory as if you received it not?’42

The Catholic Church realizes that man, faced with the radi-
cal dependence of his creaturehood, yet challenged to chose
himself and his fellow man as final goals would experience the
spiritual dizziness of a tempted creature. Would he humbly,
gratefully acknowledge his creaturehood and choose God in
preference to himself? The tragedy is that he chose himself,
opting to become God without God, thus falling into sin. Sin is
his self-alienation, not the projection from himself of an illu-
sory God, as Feuerbach taught Marx. The attempt to become
God in himself, by himself, is his self-alientation, a personal,
subjective, self-inflicted alienation. .The Catholic Church
teaches that all alienations are founded on the source of aliena-
tions—sin. Sin corrupts, disrupts man who then corrupts and
disrupts human conditions and relationships. Hence arise cul-
pable and inculpable alienations. Spiritual schizophrenia sev-
ers man from himself because it severs him from his source—
God. Once fractured within, man fractures the world about him
which, in cosmic protest at man’s sin, has already hardened
itself against him. Dante expressed the sound relationship that
alone can cure the restless, internal hostility of man: “Iz la sua
voluntate è nostra pace. [In His Will is our peace.]’**

Thus alienated, man is unhappy, not because he imagined
and projected an alien God, but because he imagined he him-
self could become God. Enamoured of his own beauty, bril-
liance, liberty, he decided to ascend the throne of God. Like
Lucifer he fell; his fall is his alienation. A reconciliation be-
tween what he is and what he arrogantly tried to be is impossi-
ble on his own terms. Marx makes the fundamental mistake of
equating the alienation of private property, his source for all
alienations, with original sin; sin is an economic evil for him;
it calls for an economic saviour. The Catholic Church teaches
that sin is a spiritual evil, an insult by man against God; it calls
for a divine saviour, since a limited creature cannot atone for
an infinite offense against an infinite Being. Yet it also calls for
a human savior, if humanity is to atone for its own offense
against both God and man. Communist humanism holds that

42. St. Paul, I Cor. 4:7.
43. Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, “Paradiso,” canto 3.

126 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the redemption of man is achieved by the sufferings of the
sacrificial lamb and economic saviour, the proletariat, whose
crucifixion and resurrection in rebellion emancipates all men
into the socialist heaven. Man is, therefore, his own saviour as
well as being his own God. The truth of the matter is, as the
Church teaches, that man is reconciled to God, his fellow man
and himself by One who is at once fully Man and fully God. He
is the only Sacrificial Lamb capable of destroying the aliena-
tion of sin and of establishing friendship between God and
man. The sufferings of proletarians are the sufferings of mere
creatures; the sufferings of Christ “knock down the wall of
separation” that sin erected.

Moreover, no man has ever suffered alienation to the extent
that the God-Man has. He has drunk its dregs. Emptied of di-
vine glory, appearing as a slave, he was infinitely humiliated
and, though innocence and holiness itself, was “made sin” in
order to destroy it and thus raise man with Himself above the
clouds. Then too, His work, His service is the primary effica-
cious work for man’s salvation; proletarian deeds in them-
selves are absolutely sterile for salvation. “Without me you can
do nothing.”’** Christ made His work man’s work because He
performed it in the name and behalf of His brethren;
proletarian work is neither salvific, infinite nor divine; by itself
it destroys rather than improves man. Christ is the universal
man, not the proletarian as Marx claims. Christ identifies Him-
self and His mission with the destiny of every man that comes
into the world; He comes and works to save all. The Christian
partakes of this universal life and mission through sacramen-
tal union with Christ. Proletarian man, on the other hand, hates
millions, divides men and fosters class wars of extinction.
Christ and His Christians love, reconcile, promote communion
of all men in their Saviour and their God.

And as for proletarian poverty and rejection by society, no
worker-victims have ever been subjected to the humiliating
experiences of the God-Man. Descended from a dynasty fallen
from power, living and working like the poorest of the poor,
rejected by His own nation and by the world, crucified by the
religious leaders of His people and put to death by the Roman
rulers of the world, Christ was buried as an executed criminal,
perhaps the greatest failure history has ever seen. His life and

44. John 15: 6. R

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 127

death were alienation intensified to an infinite degree. In Him
Christians defeat sin and death. “Death is swallowed up in
victory! O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy
sting? Now the sting of death is sin... But thanks be to God who
has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Com-
munist proletarian society recoils before the experience of
death. Allegiance to their humanistic heaven on earth renders
death more horrible than ever. For death ushers in the eternal
loss of their earthly utopia, eternal personal annihilation for
every man. But Christ, the Prince of proletarians, experiences
lowly man’s miseries in a most universal as well as individual
way. As God He knows perfectly every suffering of each man.
As man He compassionately takes into His own flesh and soul
the intimate, intense experience of suffering that is known to
the least of humans. Christ is the universal and the personal
sufferer. Identified with Him as her head, the Church partici-
pates in this paradoxical and mysterious experience. She suf-
fers in each of her members, dies in them, but continues in
history as the universal sufferer, the extension until the end of
the world of Christ crucified. No Marxist leader, no communist
humanism can ever achieve this identity of suffering between
the individual and the universal family of sufferers. Moreover,
freely accepted, gladly submitted to, Christ’s sufferings are a
service to man and God. A man like His brethren in everything
except sin, Christ alienated Himself from Himself, emptying
Himself to become a slave. He then alienated Himself from His
Father, consenting to become the target of divine vengeance
against sin. He thus identified Himself with sinful man and
died to save him from eternal death. Thus the mystery of
iniquity, the mystery of alienation, is solved only in the mystery
of Christ’s infinite love—His divine-human love for His Father
and His brethren. The dialectical history of divine-human love
saves man, not the dialectical history of matter. “He who loves
his life loses it; and he who hates his life in this world, keeps
it unto life everlasting.”** Here is the greatest genuine revolu-
tion! The revolution of love against sin! The revolution that
topples the regime of Satan, breaks the chains of sin and re-
turns man to God! Christ, the God-Man, is the passion of God for ,
God; He is equally the passion of God for man. And He is the

45. 1 Cor. 15 : 54-55.
46. John 12: 25.

128 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

perfect human exemplar of what the passion of man for man
should be. In His love all men are reconciled to God and to each
other in the one truly perfect society, the Mystical Body of
Christ.

How paltry, then, is the temporal glorification of man in so-
cialist society! Compared to the temporal and eternal diviniza-
tion of man in the Mystical Body of Christ it is a process of
degradation! Marx glorifies men as “that most precious capi-
tal” in a classless humanity. Christ glorifies men as “sons of
God” for whom he has prepared mansions in His Father’s king-
dom. Marx leaves the body of man as dust forever in the grave.
Christ raises the bodies of His members to eternal companion-
ship with Himself in glory at the right hand of the Father.
Marx’s revolution promised to establish a perfect, harmonious
society in time; it has shattered the world in dissension and
confusion. The Catholic Church, following her founder, seeks
a reconciled society; she serves and cures the world. She is the
only society that can effect permanent reconciliation between
man and God and among men. Within this society all members
become one with each other in their solidarity with Christ, the
Head. All live the same doctrine, eat the same food, offer the
same sacrifice of reconciliation, strive for the same heroic
quality of service to God and man and are called to the same
destiny—high sanctity through communion with each other in
Christ. In this sense the Catholic Church is classless because all
are made one in Christ.

The Catholic Church is seen, then, as the perfect human
society for imperfect man. In her alone the apotheosis of men
and mankind can be realized. Infinitely perfect in her head, the
God-Man, she communicates the vigor of His life to all her
members. And she does this through the ministrations of His
Spirit, the Advocate of Love and Truth. It is in and by the Holy
Spirit that Christians are changed from being timid, isolated
men into becoming zealous apostles, with God-inspired pas-
sions for their fellowmen. We need but witness those fright-
ened eleven locked in the upper room in Jerusalem before the
coming of the roaring wind and the tongues of fire loosed them
from their spiritual paralysis. The third Person of the Trinity,
Absolute Love Personified, is the soul of the Catholic Church’s
life and mission of sanctity and mercy. Charity is the new fire

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 129

that this Spirit has cast upon the earth. This charity has forged
millions of martyrs, confessors and virgins who have hero-
ically spent themselves for their fellow man. This charity con-
tinues to create millions of saints today on both sides of the iron
and bamboo curtains. The Holy Spirit, Substantial Love Him-
self, creates the human society of divine love known as the
communion of Saints. Communist humanism, on the contrary,
has its own fire, the fire of militant hatred. With the sword of
this fire it forges socialist society. Its proletarian torchbearers
bring the world not truth and love, but propaganda, terror and
war. Nothing, perhaps, conveys this spirit of fiery hatred more
clearly than the opening words of the Communist Manifesto:
“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism,”
write Marx and Engels. They conclude this famous document
with a call to arms in a total war against society:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only
by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.

Working men of all countries, unite!*’

When we analyze the claims of the Catholic Church and com-
munism on the meaning of history and their respective roles in
it, we find, as we should now expect, diametrically opposed
interpretations. Communist humanism claims it can scientifi-
cally prove that it alone gives history existence, direction and
substantive meaning. History for communism is the self-
manifestation of evolving matter in the process and develop-
ment of socialist society. History is only the battlefield of
economic forces in the affairs of men. Communism’s historical
law of evolutionary revolution focuses its main concern on the
future. The present only matters if it changes everything so as
to hasten the arrival of classless humanity. Dialectical materi-
alism is the physical and thought power behind history’s un-
folding. Revolutionary violence is the catalyst speeding history
to its chiliastic community. Unfortunately for the theory, there

47. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) translated
by Samuel Moore, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.).

130 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

is an irreducible contradiction in this dialectical process of
history. If communist society is the final end in history, what
further reason has the historical process for continuing in exis-
tence, as eternal, on-going and advancing when the final goal
is attained? Does history cease when socialist society arrives?
Is there no future then for man? Does the evolutionary, revolu-
tionary nature of matter now change completely, becoming
static and sterile? These contradictions in historical material-
ism have never been resolved.

The Catholic Church, for her part, has a consistent and ever
advancing explanation of its life and role in the meaning of
history. For her, sacred history is the whole of history; profane
history is merely a subdivision of the universal history of cos-
mic salvation. The history of salvation embraces not only the
history of mankind, but. the whole of cosmic history. The crea-
tion of the world is act one in the history of salvation. It begins
God’s plan to perfect all creatures in His Incarnate Son. The
central act of history is the Incarnation and mission of the Son
of God to save man. The last act of history will be the second
coming of Christ in power and glory to close the books on time,
judge all men and create the new heavens and earth of eternity.
The Church’s concept of one, salvific, world history is based on
Christ’s revelation of the oneness of mankind, the uniqueness
of the Incarnation and redemption and the sole destiny of crea-
tion, its glorification in Christ and God in eternity. All other
events in history—some more directly, others more remotely—
are related to the central act of the Incarnation.

In the beginning and up to the first coming of Christ in the
fullness of time, God performed stupenduous works, magnalia
Dei, so as to reveal to man the mightiness of His ways and
wisdom. When Christ, the Summit of history, appeared, God
performed in His Son miraculous works, mirabilia Dei. These
are the last and supreme historical events. Christ is thus not
the term of reference for a continuous line of events; He is the
absolute summit and termination of history, in the sense that
there can be nothing beyond Him. In Him the possibilities of
human development are exhausted. And in founding His
Church, Christ has identified it with Himself and His mission
so that she too is the summit of history, His prolongation in
time and into eternity. Finally, the last act of history can be

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 131

considered as the Summit, Christ and His triumphant Church,
being received into transcendent glory, a new, metacosmic
creation, the deification of the communion of saints. It is all one
drama. And the Catholic Church realizes in herself that mys-
terious paradox which Communism tried but failed to harmo-
nize within itself. Although the time process continues in the
life of the Church, and the last day or chronological end of the
world is in the future, nevertheless, the ultimate, perfect real-
ity and meaning of history is already present in the Person of
the Incarnate Word and the society of His Church. There is not,
because there cannot be, any greater human exaltation beyond
Christ and His Church. In them we have a beginning fulfilled
and yet, paradoxically, comprising all futurity.

The present is a period of “waiting for the sons of God to be
made known.” It is the “last times” during which is accom-
plished the gathering in and completion of the new creatures
of whom Christ is the First-born. History has already fulfilled
its full meaning and mission in Christ and His Church. It was
God’s loving design, centered in Christ and His Church, to give
history this fulfillment by subsuming everything in them. The
coming of the God-Man at the end of the world to judge man-
kind and the coming of the Messiah from the beginning to
liberate man from sin and to inaugurate His new society, the
Catholic Church, these two ends of history come together in the
God-Man. Yet there is nothing deterministic about man’s mis-
sion and destiny in these “last times.” He is to work out his
salvation “in fear and trembling.” The Catholic historian is
always face to face with the interplay of human will and the
responsibility of man for his actions. Human beings decide and
their decisions have tremendous influence in the formation of
the flow of historical events. Christians are not meant to re-
main idle during this period of waiting. They have a challeng-
ing mission, dangerous and daring enough to exercise their
powers of thought and love. St. Peter reminds Christians of
this: “All so transitory; and what men you ought to be! How
unworldly in your life, how reverent towards God, as you wait
for and kasten the day of the Lord.”**

So the Catholic Church and her members have a revolution-
ary work of their own to perform; under the guidance of the

48. 2 Peter 3: 9.

132 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Holy Spirit and urged on by His love, they are to catalyze the
coming of the Lord on the last day. Theirs is a mission requiring
courage, that readiness to win society over to Christ through
self-sacrificing persuasion, whatever the hardships demanded.
Theirs is a task that demands the exercise of a suffering zeal,
that attitude of soul which habitually takes the side of man
against falsehood and evil because it characteristically sides
with the revelation of God in Christ. But, above all, theirs is a
crusade of unshakable hope, the specific virtue of sacred his-
tory. For hope, founded on the revealed promises of God, looks
patiently, faithfully, in the teeth of insurmountable odds to:
wards the future, in a life of expectation endured in the time
process, convinced that God will establish His kingdom in glory
as the culmination of history. The object of hope is the final end
of history, the full meaning of history—the salvation of the
whole human race in the company of Jesus and his Church.
And the hope of the Catholic Church is founded on an historical
deed of her Founder, the universal Man who has risen from the
dead by His own power and has gone ahead as God-Man into His
eternal kingdom to prepare a place for His followers: “I ascend
to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
In this period of waiting for its future society of perfect man,
Communism is by no means idle either. It works zealously at its
own mission. And what is its task? The making of violent revo-
lution to hasten the advent of socialist society. On what scien-
tific or historical evidence is this utopia founded? On none.
Marx’s profession of the inevitable, golden, socialist future is
the result of an irrational, blind act of faith. It is an a priori not
an a posteriori doctrine, willed not proven, founded on no ob-
jective evidence nor on any incontrovertible authority. Indeed,
current history has for some time now been proving that Marx
and Engels were poor prophets, in error about what they pre-
dicted for man and society. For in the realm of economics,
capitalism has reformed not gotten worse; though not perfect
yet, it is not dying but flourishing. And in the realm of politics,
socialism has been disintegrating and mankind is revolting
against, not seeking, the security of its serfdom. How has com-
munism reacted to these historical realities? In irrational rage
and with unutterable violence. Unable to create, even in em-
bryo form, its dream of a future society, communist humanism
49. John 20 : 17.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 133

has set about sacrificing the perfection and happiness of its
contemporary faithful to the future happiness of mankind. It
inflicts unimaginable suffering, torturing and exterminating
millions today for the sake of a messianic mirage in the dream
of an impossible future. How can the unborn posterity of to-
day’s faithful become a perfect socialist society in the future
through the torture and degradation ‘of their ancestors? In the
name of a future, hallucinatory humanity, supposed to be
dwelling in an ever receding millenium of future happiness,
communist humanism cheapens, insults and brutalizes current
human life. It has been plowing under, during the last fifty
years, real, living generations of imperfect men for the sake of
highly abstract generations of possibly perfect men to be born
someday from the uncertain womb of history. Eugene Lyons
writes of this maniacal policy thus:

By 1934, when I departed from Russia, nothing was left of
the high mood of dedication, traces of which I had still
found among the communists six years earlier. The very
vocabulary of idealism had been outlawed. “Equality” was
lampooned as bourgeois romanticism. Excessive concern
for the needs and sensibilities of ordinary people was pun-
ished as “rotten liberalism.” Terror was no longer ex-
plained away as a sad necessity. It was used starkly and
glorified as “human engineering.” Means had blotted out
ends and have held this priority ever since.*°

Quite the opposite of this savage society with its barbaric
policies, the Catholic Church cares for, cures, sanctifies, liber-
ates man today. Today she is already the perfect society. Today
she divinizes man and his social institutions. To every man who
joins her she gives the germ of divine life through her sacra-
mental activity. Today her members are growing in this divine
life which is destined to mature fulfillment in eternity. The
Church sacrifices no generation to another. Each generation is
precious to her for its own sake and because Christ redeemed
it; each generation is loved for itself in God; each generation is
taught, trained and guided in truth and sanctity. And each gen-
eration is given the sublime task of handing down to its chil-
dren the divinely social life it received in love from its
ancestors. There is nothing hallucinatory in the Catholic

50. Workers’ Paradise Lost, p. 380.

134 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Church and her sacramental life; she and her work are practi-
cal, founded on an historical Person; they are real with the
plenary power of all dimensions of reality—the divine and the
human. The history of the world for two thousand years and up
to the present has been the era of the Church. The future be-
longs to her too, for she is the only human institution guaran-
teed immortality both in time and eternity.

As for communist humanism, it will never be the wave of
future history. It has already been characterized as “a spent
wave of the past.” History will record its death and burial. And
the Catholic Church will pray over its corpse. Death is its only
future. At its fiftieth anniversary, it was hated by its own peo-
ple and distrusted by the entire world. Its science, art, tech-
nology, politics, every phase of its inter-human relationships,
have failed to gain credibility or legitimacy because all its ac-
tivities subserve its power cliques and its false ideology. As its
imperial colonialism expands, its people shrivel. Yet its swol-
len condition is already a sign that whatever vitality it origi-
nally had is now on the decline. Perceptive, longtime analysts
of communism are indicating the symptoms of its disintegra-
tion. Doctrinal rigidity has produced rigor mentis in its
theoreticians. Sclerosis of the mind has led to paralysis of
policy. Excessively on the defensive, communist countries
have ringed themselves with iron and bamboo curtains, mas-
sive walls, mined zones, electrified barbed-wire, Migged skies.
All this to keep slaves from freedom and free men from investi-
gating what is hidden behind those walls. Heresy and disillu-
sionment are rampant among its students; national parties are
fracturing and satellites are breaking out of the communist
orbit, veering toward free, open courses. Civil war and anarchy
have exploded in the Asian communist compound. Cynicism,
creeping demoralization and stark fear grip its officialdom,
which sits atop a volcano of a billion seething souls planning
to erupt in raging vengeance when their hour has come, as
come it must.

With its ideology a catastrophic failure, its leadership medi-
ocre, its superstructure rotting and its masses defiant, how long
can its naked military might hold this massive concentration
camp together? For no man of civilized sensibilities would seri-
ously consider communism’s national and international states

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 135

genuine societies. These “termite colonies” are even now sick
unto death; their disease is terminal. It may take a long or short
time, but the death of communism is inevitable. A day will
come when the forces of decay and revolt within will coincide
with the forces of assault and freedom from without; then com-
munism will crumble, be wiped from reality, to be remembered
only, like Nazism, Fascism and Japanese militarism, as a horri-
ble nightmare that plagued the human race for over half a
century. At present communism’s death warrant is written in
the soul of every man who loves God, his fellow man, freedom
and his Church. The execution of communism will take place
when God in his inscrutable wisdom reveals the proper time
and brings together the proper forces. Moreover, because com-
munism is so essentially and intensely anti-Christ, anti-Cath-
olic, anti-Christian and anti-religious, the weapon that will be
most efficacious in its execution is the fiery sword of Christ’s
truth and love as incarnated in His Church.

It should now be evident why the Catholic Church must for-
mally and firmly resist communist atheism either unto its con-
version or destruction. Every constitutive element of the
Catholic Church is directly opposed by a constitutive element
of communist humanism. If communism is true, the Church
must be false; if communism is good, the Church must be evil;
if communism is reality, the Church must be myth; if commu-
nism is history, the Church must be legend. And if Catholic
dogmas are the truth, then the whole gamut of communist
doctrines are falsifications. For communist humanism is a
deliberate transposition of Christian revelations into secula-
rized, pseudo-scientific doctrines. Indeed, Marx received from
Hegel that philosopher’s explicit transmutation of the body of
Christian truths into a rationalistic system of natural truths.
The one Catholic truth Marx and his followers failed to treat
and transmute—the sacramental nature of the Church’s being
and activity—is the very one that Hegel failed to transpose, for
as a Lutheran theologian, Hegel only knew a Protestant Chris-
tianity that had already lost the deep significance of the sacra-
mental.

The Catholic Church resists communist humanism not only
for her own survival, but for the survival of what is essentially
human. She sees in the mental derangement and emotional

136 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

frenzy of this militant, atheistic humanism the latest, most
organized, most pernicious incarnation of antihuman, anti-God
diabolism. And she has no alternative but to follow the warning
of St. Peter, her first Pope, in matters of religious warfare: “Be
sober, be watchful! For your adversary the devil, as a roaring
lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour. Resist him,
steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same suffering befalls
your brethren all over the world.”*!

The Costs of Communist Barbarism

Our assessment of communist atheism must be far more
than merely speculative. As we have already seen, communist
humanism demands of its followers not merely faith but deeds
in support of that faith. In this it is at one with the Catholic
Church, which applies the criterion of its divine Master when
determining its good members and, above all, its heroes of sanc-
tity: “By their fruits you shall know them.” Communist human-
ism, therefore, should certainly not take it amiss if we apply its
own criterion to its performance in history for the past fifty
years. What has communist humanism done to man, for man
in the fifty years of its power? And we are speaking here not of
abstract socialist man, the man of the future who does not
exist, has never existed and can never exist. We want to know
what communist humanism has done for real men, the men it
saw, heard, touched in the cities and country places of the
world. We want to know the stubborn facts of its historical
conduct.

Let us first consider communist humanism’s respect for hu-
man life. British journalist D. G. Stewart-Smith, in his study of
this aspect of communism entitled Defeat of Communism, es-
timated that this militantly godless movement killed some
eighty-three million persons from 1917 to 1964. Of these more
than forty-five million were its own Russian citizens. Other
sources, and there are hundreds of reliable ones, give varying
figures. But no matter how the figures differ, they all record
human slaughter in the millions and establish the irrefutable
fact of communism’s utter contempt for human life in its
maniacal pursuit of its abstract goal. Eugene Lyons relates that
at Yalta, when Winston Churchill expressed sympathy for the

51. 1 Peter 5 : 8-10.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 137

enormous number of Russians killed in the war, Stalin passed
this horrible holocaust off with a shrug of his shoulders, reveal-
ing that his collectivization of the farms program against a
rebellious peasantry exacted far more lives than the war.®?
When one realizes that the Second World War cost Russia from
fifteen to twenty million lives, one is left aghast at the numbers
of its own citizens liquidated by communism through its
purges, executions, deliberately imposed famines, liquidations
of kulaks and the high mortality rates fostered by inhuman
conditions in concentration camps.

And how does communist humanism treat the living?
Through its techniques of degradation, it impoverishes men
and grinds them down to indescribable perversions. It keeps
man bound to a time-terrestrial leash like a chained animal. It
places a premium on lying and treachery, shatters families by
sudden arrests; it systematically persecutes all religious faiths
and practices, bans sacred books, burns holy objects and herds
Christians, Moslems and Jews into prison camps solely for reli-
gious reasons. It robs every man of his God, honor, a transcen-
dental vision, a life of creative freedom. Terrorism is its
normal interpersonal policy. Dr. Mihajlo Mihajlov is presently
in prison because he revealed in his book, Moscow Summer,
that “millions of Soviet citizens languish in death and forced
labor camps.” Moreover, he was the first to reveal publicly that
the original death camps were not founded by the Nazis, but by
the communists, in 1921 near Arklangelsk, where the Kolgomor
camp was established with the sole end in view of physically
obliterating its inmates. In the years of the great Stalin purges
in Russia, 1936-1938, “over three million people disappeared
from the earth’s surface in the Soviet Union,” according to the
late Moshe Pijade. The slaughter of tens of millions of men,
women and children shocks one’s conceptual and imaginative
powers, but when one reads of hatred sown among members of
the same family, the execrable sadism of communism leaves
the whole person numb with horror. Eugene Lyons records this
unnatural practice of spiritual cannibalism:

Other regimes may have induced young children to spy on
their parents—it remained for the Soviets to erect a monu-
ment to Pavlik Morozov, a little monster who informed on

52. Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost, p. 355.

138 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

his father and mother and got them executed. The Pavlik
episode occured in the 1930’s in a village in the Sverdlovsk
area. Peasant neighbors were so infuriated by this action
that they killed the boy, thus creating a martyr memorial-
ized in metal in that village and held up as a model for all
good little communists.**

What is communist humanism’s attitude toward freedom of
inquiry and expression? We have already seen that the profes-
sion of communist humanism imposes as a practical necessity
the duty to destroy free societies and their free activities. Hav-
ing walléd in their own serfs against the flow of reports, re-
searches and critical evaluations from free world print, radio,
cinema and travel, the communist overlords exercise absolute
control over schools, news media and intellectual and social
associations of any kind. Their censorship is absolute; they feed
their own people and the outside world only authorized truths,
doctored facts, sovietized history. Even communist professors
are not free to research and publish in their particular speciali-
ties immune from censorship. The teaching profession is al-
ways in mental servitude to party demands. Scholarly criteria
are tailored to the needs of ideology and current policies. Text-
books from kindergarten on are slanted to conform with Marx-
ist-Leninist doctrine and the prevailing policy thrust.
Communist history is the most creative history extant, surpass-
ing in imagination even many historical novels. André Gide,
after a journey through Russia which cured him of early rosy
illusions about communism, reported: “I doubt that in any
country of the world, even Hitler’s Germany, is thought less
free, more bowed down, more terrorized.”54

Concurrent with severe censorship at home is communism’s
intense indoctrination abroad. This intellectual infiltration
takes place especially in the universities of the free world.
Communist professors and speakers fill classrooms and lecture
halls, systematically indoctrinating millions of eager minds to
conform to communist doctrines. Abusing the blessings of aca-
demic freedom, these dedicated, trained professors deftly
seduce young minds to pseudo-truth and inflame noble emo-
tions to pseudo-ideals, thereby prostituting the learning pro-

53. Ibid, p. 376.
54. Quoted by Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost, p. 365.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 139

cess. Warning universities of this systematic indoctrination
and its treacherous techniques, Fr. Costanzo, S.J. offers a wise
critique of this matter and suggests an enlightened policy on
how to thwart it:

The members of the Academy have duties toward the so-
ciety of which it is itself a beneficiary. I am motivated by
a deep conviction that academic freedom should not be
entrusted to those who would work for its destruction by
subverting the free society within which a free academy
may exist and flourish and which they deny wherever they
are in dominant control. No one may reasonably claim the
right to work for the denial of these rights to others. We
are not obliged to tolerate, in the Academy or out of it,
those who would not tolerate us if they had the power; nor
are we obliged to tolerate those who would subvert the
civil order under the cloak of freedom of study and teach-
ing. Academic freedom, like 'the Bill of Rights, is not a
suicide pact.

...A Communist teacher exploits the privileges of aca-
demic freedom because by training, purpose and dedica-
tion he intends not to teach but to twist and torture the
truth. He is neither reliable nor trustworthy.®>

Conclusion

Communist humanism does not liberate man; it delivers man
into his own hands to do with himself what he will; this is
slavery. For, once man rejects God, he has no place to go but
back into himself and there lies the agony of isolation. Thus,
the revolt against God is the prelude to all serfdom. For the
essence of man’s freedom is that he be able to transcend him-
self, the material things of earth and choose to live in compan-
ionship with God. Indeed, it was in order that man might enjoy
freedom that God, Absolute Liberty Himself, made man in His
own image and likeness. He made him a little less than the
angels. But communist humanism, in delivering man into his
own hands, really renders man captive to the material world
below man. Communist humanism, by ripping man down from
God, the source of all freedom, makes man less than man.

55. Rev. Joseph F. Costanzo, S.J., Tke Academy and The City, pamphlet
printed by Cork University Press, Dublin, 1961, pp. 12, 13.

140 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

There is a law of creation which is unchangeable and is tragi-
cally enforced in the lives of men. It can be expressed thus:
Cosmic captivity constricts a creature more rigidly the further
it recedes from God in essence and activity. When the freest of
creatures, the angels, fled from God in revolt, they became
constricted in their own hatred, spirits hardened in chosen evil.
They became also inmates of the prison of hell, subjected to the
tyranny of the angel who led their revolt. Similarly, when free
men reject God, they become walled-in by their own hatred,
hardened in chosen evil. Moreover, they become slaves in the
prison of the very cosmos which drew them away from God.
Wherever it has dominated, communist humanism has erected
walls that have isolated human spirits as well as human bodies.
Behind its visible, iron curtain is also drawn around every hu-
män soul the infinitely more desolate curtain of spiritual isola-
tion. Many have committed suicide through the madness
induced by the torture of spiritual incarceration. Those who
have survived to tell of their agonies, unanimously relate that
the presence of God, whose Spirit breathes where He will and
cannot be bound, sustained them through the communion of
His loving companionship.

For without God, human freedom, dignity and the infinite
value of the human spirit are severed from their principle of
truth. And without God there is no longer any infinite Defender
of these human values who can obligate man, under sanction
of reward or punishment, to reverence the divine likeness in
his fellowman. Man is free when he clings to God. In the words
of the God-Man, “The truth shall make you free.”5® But to cling
to God—adhaerere Deo—is to cling to Absolute Truth and to
enjoy inner freedom. A Daniel in the lions’ den or the three
youths in the fiery furnace are free because God is with them.
Communism, on the other hand, teaches man to cling to matter
—adhaerere materiae—to cling to creatures in preference to
God. But for man to subject himself to matter is the equivalent
of his choosing to sink below himself, to become captive to the
cosmos and its iron laws of determinism. Freedom is rooted in
the spiritual, in the divine; servitude is rooted in the material,
in the creaturely. Communism immerses man in matter, in the
creaturely, in man himself. And there is no greater tyrant over

56. John 8 : 33.

Marx: Cosmic Classless Society Becomes God 141

man than man himself. For when man becomes his own God,
as in communist humanism he inevitably does, this self-
idolatry becomes so arrogantly irrational that it demands the
life of every human being as its victim. It is in communist
humanism that the metaphysically irrational extremes of
Feuerbach and Hobbes meet and, paradoxically, complete each
other. When Feuerbach’s dictum, “Man is man’s only God”—
Homo homini. Deus—is professed and practiced, then Hobbes’s
dictum, “Man is a wolf to his fellowman”’—Homo homini
lupus—eventually becomes the jungle law and practice of an
organized Godless society.

Our conclusion is inevitable. There are psychic as well as
physical cancers. Communist humanism is a psychic malig-
nancy. It rots every cell of society; it produces predatory man;
it organizes predatory parties and invades, contaminates, ul-
cerates all organs of society. Its metastatic zeal is messianic
and, unless checked by divine remedies, will extinguish human
life and speed to completion the social, spiritual disintegration
it has initiated. As a secularized perversion of the genuine mes-
sianic community—the true Church and people of God—the
power of communism will have to be destroyed essentially by
the power of God. But man, who cannot live without God, will
have to return to God and rededicate himself to the Will of God.
For as Dostoevsky has said: “If God is nothing, everything is
permitted; if God is nothing, everything is a matter of indiffer-
ence.”*? Thus man will only liberate himself from the slavery
of communist humanism by living in communion with God.
For God, who created man without his consent, will not save
him without his cooperation, not even from that ultimate
spiritual evil, the cancer of communism.

57. Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils (The Possessed), transl. by David Magar-
shark (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 126.

CHAPTER V

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Comte: Social Humanity as God

AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF BURGEONING DISORDER
in the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution, in an atmos-
phere of flagrantly avowed and triumphally marching atheism,
Auguste Comte, the great Social Synthesist, thrived and
created his vast Cours de philosophie positive. He is a typically
French thinker whose ideas do not rise directly from Kantian
or Hegelian roots, though his ideals have much in common with
his German contemporaries. In the same year (1842) that
Feuerbach published The Essence Of Christianity, Comte pub-
lished his massive classic. Both authors presented man with a
new idol. Commenting on both works, Emile Saisset noted:
“Herr Feuerbach in Berlin, like Monsieur Comte in Paris, offers
Christian Europe a new god to worship—the human race.”
Disturbed and depressed as he observed the futile agony of
France, of Europe struggling to recover from the cataclysm of
the Revolution, the Red Terror, the fall of the Bonaparte Em-
pire, Comte felt called to the mission to replace disorder with

Comte: Social Humanity as God 143

order, to bring about the total reconstruction of society. He
gradually became convinced that the greatest hindrance to the
ordered advancement of society from its material and cultural
poverty was the unchecked fermentation of the revolutionary
spirit. Revolution had already crushed the Ancien Régime,
dissolved the power and coherency of the Church, rendered
existing institutions morally and economically ineffective,
disoriented the thoughts and beliefs of men and sent society
wandering off in all directions, its actions ungoverned and mis-
directed. A new society had to be created over the ruins of the
medieval hierarchy that was once the Church and State. A new
faith had to replace the decadent belief of tired Christianity;
new feelings, new loyalties, new moral purposes, a new order
of thought and action had to recall scattered society from its
drift in order to reconstruct it along lines that would assure its
progress in the new, advancing complex age of industrializa-
tion.

But Comte realized that his social reconstruction demanded
a reliable foundation in knowledge. The new society, the new
humanity would have to rest on man himself, on his responsi-
ble assumption of power to govern himself according to posi-
tive principles. God, metaphysics, transcendent destinies,
traditional beliefs, religious rituals and feelings had all failed
man; they had led him to the precipice and cast him into the
abyss of chaos. There could be no returning to smashed idols.
Man’s destiny, henceforth, was in his own hands not God’s; his
society was to be his own creation not the Church’s; his religion
was to be his worship of himself. Thus would man finally
achieve mental, social and theological coherence and cohesion.
In his final days Comte prided himself on having actually real-
ized this encyclopaedic blueprint, this triple synthesis that pro-
vided man with a way of life capable of solving all his problems
and fulfilling all his highest aspirations. But before scrutiniz-
ing the Comtian synthesis, a brief view of the man and his
manners is in order so as to place his work and character in
proper perspective.

Auguste Comte was born on January 19, 1798, in the year VI
of the French Republic, son of ardent Catholic parents who
were deeply distressed that the child was not permitted to be
baptized. For all churches had been closed and baptism of chil-

144 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

dren was forbidden, indeed punished by law, since 1793. At the
age of nine he entered the lycée at Montpellier, where he was
born and grew up. He was a brilliant student with a phenome-
nal memory, retaining and able to recite back flawlessly whole
poems and pages read but once. A child prodigy outstanding in
mathematics, he was at fifteen ready to attend the Ecole Poly-
technique, the highest institution of technical learning in
France. But because of his youth he was required to work an-
other year on higher mathematics at the lycée. Now his extra
year at the lycée proved a blessing for he came under the tute-
lage of a remarkable professor, Daniel Encontre, theologist,
philosopher-mathematician and dramatist who kindled in
Comte an enthusiasm for exact sciences and broad culture.
Though a prodigy, Comte was also a problem child. Product
of the revolution, he was in revolt against all authority, against
all conformity. He drew special delight from destructive activi-
ties. At fourteen he claimed he was already an atheist. “I don’t
believe in God,” he would repeat incessantly. And it appeared
that in Comte’s case this revolt against God was not mere boy-
ish bravado. Even at this early age he was expelled from the
Ecole Polytechnique for being the ringleader of a group who
arrogantly refused to observe school regulations. After a year
spent in the rigid, royalist regime of his family, Comte traveled
to Paris and in 1817 found a position there as Secretary to the
famous Saint-Simon. Comte was then only nineteen years old.
Six years under the brilliant Saint-Simon matured the genius
of Comte. He drank in many of the ideas and aspirations of
Saint-Simon’s astonishingly fertile mind. Saint-Simon was the
continuer and developer of theories set out by the Voltairean
Condorcet, the Italian philosopher Vico and the English savant
Francis Bacon. Condorcet had already called for a science of
society based on a study of history; in Vico could be found “the
law of the three stages.” In his major work, Industry, Saint-
Simon developed his ideas of the industrial society of the future
and called for replacing theological morality with positive in-
dustrial morality. At his death in 1825 Saint-Simon had just
about completed what he hoped would be his greatest work,
New Christianity. In this he called for the establishment of the
future society that would be founded not only on industrial
organization for technical progress, but also on belief in a Su-

Comte: Social Humanity as God 145

preme Power and in the brotherhood of man. This conversion
of his master from promoter of materialistic man in a human-
istic heaven to apostle of religious man in a Christian mil-
lenium was too much for Comte. As a fervent intellectual
atheist, he could no longer remain with Saint-Simon in the
position of secretary and collaborator. He broke with his mas-
ter and struck out on his own. But the seal of his master was
forever branded onto his soul, for Comte left deeply cultured
with Saint-Simonian motifs. The seeds of Positivism planted by
Saint-Simon were to produce a plentiful harvest. At first resent-
ful and indignant over his master’s relapse into spiritual and
moral emotionalism, Comte refused to admit any influence on
his own work from that fallen intellectual power. In a moment
of graciousness, however, even the egotistical Comte relented
and confessed his debt to his master. In a letter to a friend,
quoted by Durkheim, he said: “I certainly owe a great deal
intellectually to Saint-Simon, that is to say, he contributed pow-
erfully to launching me in the philosophic direction that I have
clearly created for myself today and that I will follow without
hesitation all my life.” And to the same friend he wrote in 1818:
“I have learned through this relationship of work and friend-
ship with one of the men who sees furthest in philosophic poli-
tics. I have learned a mass of things I vainly would have sought
in books, and my mind has made more headway these six
months of our connection than it would in three years, had I
been alone.”!

When master Saint-Simon died in 1825, the mantle of this
ingenious visionary of new ideas fell upon Comte, the disciple,
methodical thinker and builder of new systems. Comte was
only twenty-seven when he developed “the law of the three
states.” With his work, Fundamental Principles of the Positive
Philosophy, he set out on a vast adventure which, in its three-
fold thrust and campaign into theology, philosophy and phys-
ics, aimed at the immediate, orderly reorganization of the
World and Humanity.

Perhaps the most profitable method for comprehending Com-
te’s atheistic positivism is to compare it with Kant’s critical
philosophy. Both Comte and Kant are convinced of the sterility

1. David Shillan, The Order of Mankind as Seen by Auguste Comte (Norfolk
Lodge, Richmond Hill, Surrey: New Atlantis Foundation), p. 4.

146 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

of speculative theology and metaphysics. Kant does, however,
admit some slight meaning and usefulness to discussions about
noumena, things-in-themselves which exist beyond the grasp
of science. He does not reduce all rational activity merely to the
procedures of empirical sciences. He admits that some mental
activity transcends scientific endeavor. But, in the last analy-
sis, reason, despite its metaphysical labors, never achieves
valid knowledge of God, ethics or religion. For his part, Comte
rejects metaphysics and theology as sources of natural or su-
perior knowledge. Since anything they propose as true cannot
be verified by scientific methods, they contribute fictions, not
facts, to human learning. True, these fictional viewpoints are
useful and even necessary as evolutionary and historical mo-
ments on the ladder of humanity’s climb from its depth of
superstition to its summit of positive wisdom. Kant’s attitude
toward metaphysical and theological disciplines is critical,
ending in his rejection of them as sources of true knowledge.
Comte’s attitude toward science is uncritical but positive.
Since, for Comte, scientific methods alone capture and reflect
accurately the real world, science alone gives real knowledge.
Thus, in the end, both Kant and Comte equally despair of the
mind’s ability to attain the transcendent. Kant, by his idealism,
has sealed himself off from full reality in the prison of his own
mind. Comte, by his positivism, has immersed himself totally
in the prison of his senses, refusing even to admit the possibil-
ity of transcendent being.

Comte’s positivism also bears a strong resemblance to He-
gel’s historicism. Both aspire to formulate a comprehensive
view of reality through an all-inclusive, omni-competent sys-
tem. Both systems are dynamic with the power of historical,
evolutionary development. Comte’s famous “law of the three
stages” of human evolution, revealed in unfolding history in
relationship to every science, has an Hegelian flavor of inevita-
bility and indispensability. Both Comte and Hegel subtly use
their respective systems as instruments for the demolition of
philosophies of life which have preceded their own, especially
for the destruction of the Christian metaphysical and theologi-
cal viewpoint. The technique is to claim that the time for the
Christian ideal is past. Christianity has served its propaedeutic
role in the historical unfolding of humanity’s ascent to a su-

Comte: Social Humanity as God 147

perior scientific, political, social and cultural synthesis. For
Hegel that superior synthesis and reality will be cosmic Rea-
son’s fully achieved self-consciousness; for Comte that superior
synthesis will be fully rational human society perfected by
positive philosophy.

Moreover, the basic affinity of Comte’s atheistic adventure to
those of Marx and Nietzsche, despite their obvious differences,
is perceptively reported by Henri de Lubac:

To anyone observing the great spiritual currents of our age -
from a certain altitude, positivism will seem less the an-
tagonist than the ally of the Marxist and Nietzschean cur-
rents. By other methods, in another spirit and in
competition with them, it strives for the same essential
object. Like them, it is one of the ways in which modern
man seeks to escape from any kind of transcendency and
to shake off the thing it regards as an unbearable yoke—
namely, faith in God. “To discover a man with no trace of
God in him” is how M. Henri Gouhier defines Auguste
Comte’s self-appointed task.?

The Venture of Human Progress

Comte founded his atheism on the discovery of a fundamen-
tal law to which the human intelligence is necessarily sub-
jected. A study of the development of human intelligence
throughout history, Comte claimed, revealed that the human
mind, in every branch of its knowledge, necessarily ascended
through three successive theoretical conditions: the Theologi-
cal or fictitious, the Metaphysical or abstract, and the Scientific
or positive. To be more specific, it is the dynamic nature of
human intelligence to employ in its progress three methods of
philosophizing whose dispositions are radically different and
essentially opposed, namely, the theological, metaphysical and
positive methods. The result is that man has produced mutually
exclusive philosophies and systems in his attempt to interpret
cosmic, human history with scientific, rational consistency. Ac-
cording to Comte, the theologically fictitious stage of human
knowledge is a necessary point of departure, representing man-

2. The Drama of Atheist Humanism, p. 78.

148 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

kind’s mental infancy. The metaphysically abstract stage is
merely transitional, representing mankind’s mental adoles-
cence. But the scientifically positive stage is fixed and defini-
tive. It represents mankind’s fully mature achievement of a
perfectly rational society. We shall now examine important
aspects of Comte’s system.

From Fetishism to Atheism

The first stage of man’s intellectual development can be
designated as the theological enterprise. According to Comte,
“Each of us is aware, if he looks back upon his own history that
he was a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his
youth, and a physicist in his manhood.”* Man begins his think-
ing by conceiving phenomena of all kinds as products of the
direct, continuous action of supernatural beings. In his mental
hunger to grasp the nature of beings, of first and final causes,
of all reality, man conceives entities largely in terms of analo-
gies with his own being and activities. Consequently he as-
cribes to purely natural phenomena feelings, thoughts and
volitions that are characteristic of his own responses to reality.
In this primitive stage his thoughts tend to be animistic and
anthropomorphic. Man sees everything under the categories of
plan, purpose, order, will, thereby seeking the explanation of
the existence and activity of everything in terms of an indwell-
ing and guiding spirit. The first question bothering man as theo-
logical quester is “Who is the cause of this vast universe of
diverse beings?” And the second follows immediately, “Why?”
The question “How did it all come about?” is scarcely important
until the first two queries are answered satisfactorily. Identifi-
cation and justification are so much more important to the
theological mind than explanation. Thus, according to Comte,
from the theological standpoint the universe is conceived as a
spiritual order of myths. Its animating purposes are in things
as effective agencies, causing them to behave as they do. Thus
each phenomenon is really personified and every process is an
action guided by a supernatural cause. Within this “fictitious
stage,” there are three developments that comprise the whole

3. Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, Société Positiviste, 5 edi-
tions, (Paris: 1892-1894), Vol. I, p. 4.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 149

history of religion—fetishism, polytheism and monotheism.

In Comte’s ingenious theory, “man everywhere began with
the crassest fetishism.” In his fetishistic belief and worship
man revered physical objects as though they were alive, had
feelings, expressed purposes of their own and exercised magi-
cal powers for the rise or fall of his fortunes. But eventually his
irrational devotion to these magical powers failed to satisfy
man’s intellectual hunger or solve his social problems. More-
over, the sorcerers who petitioned these supernatural beings on
behalf of the faithful, far from becoming their guides to
spiritual order, became agents of spiritual oppression by using
their spiritual activities to gain power over the people and their
affairs. Thus, in his effort to attain liberation from the slavery
and darkness of fetishism, man proceeded to the belief and
practice of polytheism. Polytheism is an ascent from the torpor
of fetishism. Within the polytheistic milieu there takes place
the gradual simplification of pluralistic animism. At this stage
invisible, semivisible “gods” replace fetishes. These gods, who
are quite similar to human persons, are held responsible for the
whole history of phenomena in man’s daily living.

But even the gods failed to be satisfactory guides to meaning-
ful order for mankind. Blighted as they were with human pas-
sions and pettiness, they were quite frequently agents of
cataclysmic tragedy for man. They had mankind going round
and round forever in a radically vicious and monotonously
hopeless circle. There was a desperate urge to break out of this
prison of fate and to run forward with intellectual freedom.
Thus man did escape to the monotheistic plateau in his theolog-
ical enterprise. In the succession of his different phases of
development, monotheism is intermediate between the theo-
logical and the metaphysical state. Monotheism consolidates
all the gods into a unified godhead. Spiritual powers are concen-
trated into the hands of the One God who is conceived of as
creating the whole universe, imparting to it its own powers,
activities, purposes, yet, nevertheless, as governing his uni-
verse simultaneously by himself and through cooperation with
his lesser agencies, seeing to it that his final goal is inevita-
bly attained whether free creatures promote or oppose his
plans. But. monotheism contributes to man’s development
no new principle for advancement. Being nothing more than

150 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

reduced, concentrated polytheism, it preserves the fantastic
elements of backward theology. The One God is essentially
the same stuff as the many gods; he functions to solve the same
problem; the Providence is really fate, gradually and cleverly
transformed.

The second state of man’s advancement to mental maturity
is known as the metaphysical transition. Why transition? Com-
te’s explanation is again masterly. Although the theological
phase of man’s evolution was an indispensable first step for-
ward, it was nevertheless, also purely temporary, preparatory
for further development toward the stage of positive science.
Yet theology and physics are so diametrically opposed that they
need a mediator to construct a bridge between them. That
bridge-builder is metaphysics.

Theology and physical science are so utterly incompatible,
their conceptions are so radically opposed that before re-
nouncing the ones and using exclusively the others, man’s
intelligence had to have recourse to intermediary concep-
tions of an amphibious nature; the very intermediate char-
acter of these ideas was calculated to bring about the
transition in a gradual way. All this indicates the natural
destiny of metaphysical conceptions.*

Man’s penchant for thinking animistically now begins to
disappear. As he grows in reflective dexterity, a metamorphosis
takes place in his mental and spiritual outlooks. He begins to
produce abstract ideas from linking phenomenal facts in
greater and greater complexity. Thus the primitive theologian
gradually develops into the subtle metaphysician. Now the
metaphysician rejects the view that nature is the divine crea-
tion of a providential God. Man’s conceptions begin to move
away from theology towards physics through the medium of
“etherealized” universals. The supernatural influence of God,
gods and spirits is replaced by mysterious essences, causes and
substances. True, these bloodless concepts are related to both
theology and physics, but they are leaving the realm of fiction
for the realm of reality; they are on the threshold of science.
Indeed, the characteristic thrust of the metaphysician, as op-
posed to the theologian, is not so much to vivify and personify

4. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 7-8.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 151

wind or sea or lightning as to “reify” essences, causes, poten-
cies. The metaphysician replaces invisible divinities with the
invisible logos. Yet his so-called proofs remain products of im-
magination, not of science. Though at bottom remaining a
“shade of bastard theology,” devitalized, inconsistent, ambigu-
ous, yet metaphysics fostered the coming of man’s scientific
maturity at least in the negative work of dissolving the con-
cepts of the theological stage. Nevertheless, because of its am-
biguity, because of its secret fascination for its lost God and its
pining for the fleshpots of theology, metaphysics may be “the
most dangerous obstacle to the final establishment of a true
philosophy.” The western world has been too long addicted to
its boastful spirit of always proving everything. It will have to
throw off this chronic malady of its transitional youth and pass
directly into the health and peace of the positive state.

The third stage of man’s mental evolution towards progress
and unitive maturity is known as the state of the scientific
synthesis. Just as the theologian had to disappear that the
metaphysician could arrive, so also the metaphysician must die
that the physicist might be born. In this stage of positive
science, the scientist will gradually, but inevitably, take posses-
sion of all the territory successively lost by theologians and
metaphysicians. In this phase of his adulthood, man no longer
searches for transcendent or immanent causes. He simply
desires to discover the empirically verifiable laws that govern
and explain the phenomena of nature. Physical nature, of
course, replaces a personal God or an abstract First Cause, as
the source of order in the whole universe. The mind now inves-
tigates and concludes solely through the criterion of experi-
ence. The metaphysical mode of thought began to cede
ascendency to the positive philosophy when the metaphysi-
cians themselves divided into rival camps over the existential
status of universal concepts. Realists opposed nominalists in
this controversy. Once they had introduced skepticism over the
reality of universals, the metaphysicians effectively under-
mined faith in the reality of any transcendent beings whatso-
ever.

But positive philosophy bypasses such metaphysical contro-
versies as so much sterile logic-chopping, for it maintains that
logical analysis alone is incapable of settling the question of

152 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

existence. The positive scientist sees all events as parts of a
constant order of phenomena. Each being and event is the in-
variable product of some antecedent condition or combination
of conditions. The mind now applies itself to the study of the
laws of phenomena and their variable relations of succession
and coordination. The sole means to valid knowledge now
becomes the findings of experience. This knowledge will be
gathered and collated through observational reports, the ac-
cumulation of particular data and the formulation of general
hypotheses and theories which realistically and reasonably
connect these facts with other facts to form systematic, scien-
tific disciplines of learning. Such natural, scientific knowledge
of the world establishes propositions about the regular connec-
tions among phenomena. Such propositions can be proven only
by testing. Thus all human knowledge is knowledge of the
world as men experience it. But since the world and man are
in evolution, all human knowledge is limited, never final, never
absolute. Thus the major tendency of the positive mind is to
substitute the relative for the absolute in all cases. The positive
mind knows no essences of things nor even their modes of
production. Everything that develops spontaneously is neces-
sarily legitimate for a certain time; there are no eternal truths
or principles of human conduct. All man.can know is the rela-
tions between facts in the mode of succession or similitude. We
know that relations existing under the same circumstances are
constant. This constancy of interlinking resemblances and
consequences among phenomena constitutes the laws of the
universe and of society. The essential causes—originative,
final, efficient—are unknown and inscrutable.

The tragedy of mankind’s development up to Comte’s time
was that positive philosophy had not yet succeeded in effec-
tively killing off the parasite of metaphysics. Though positivity
had, through its secret action from the very beginning, de-
stroyed the theological addictions of the human mind, yet it
had failed to lay claim to all realms of phenomena; its univer-
sal rule had not yet been accomplished. There remained large
areas in human affairs, especially in man’s social activities, to
which the positive philosophy had not yet applied its empirical
method. And Comte knew precisely what was needed most and
that he was the man of genius destined to bring about the matu-

Comte: Social Humanity as God 153

ration of evolving society by the discovery and application of
what he called “social physics.”

Everything, then, can be reduced to a simple question of
fact: Does positive philosophy, which in the last two centu-
ries has gradually undergone so great a development, en-
compass today all realms of phenomena? It is evident that
this is not the case; consequently, a great deal of scientific
work remains to be done in order to give positive philoso-
phy the character of universality that is necessary for its
definitive constitution ... There remains one science to
complete the system of sciences of observation—social
physics.®

Comte claimed that his “social physics” (he later coined the
term “sociology”) had introduced the last stage df development
in the physical domain of man’s progress. This positive science
was to make a study of the moral phenomena existing in all
human societies. With the appearance of Auguste Comte on the
stage of history the hour of the positive age has finally struck.
From the beginning of mankind’s quest for maturity, the move-
ments of theology and metaphysics propelled man, however
haltingly and subconsciously, out of his primitive anarchy to-
ward social fulfillment in science. Along this arduous, histori-
cal ascent anyone who had made a real contribution to science
was a forerunner and foreknower of positive wisdom. In more
modern times, however, men of great genius had accelerated
the advent of the positive millenium. Comte regarded Bacon,
Descartes and Galileo as prophets, indeed, founders—cofound-
ers with himself, of course—of the excellent method of positiv-
ism. Since their time and henceforth, only the positive mind
will develop valid knowledge because it alone is gifted with the
power of logical coherence. Nor is there any fear that positive
philosophy’s character will undergo any substantive changes.
It will develop merely by accretion, for it will advance by apply-
ing itself to all phases of social life, thereby creating and disci-
plining new social sciences. Once it has acquired the character
of universality, positive philosophy will forever exclude and
replace what was once the superiority of theology and meta-
physics. Future generations will examine the two discarded

5. Comte, op. cit, Vol. I, pp. 12-13.

154 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

methods as interesting relics of on-going history. Theology
must wane and disappear as physics waxes and advances, Once
in power and unopposed, positive philosophy will not so much
deny and reject God as dismiss and forget Him. For the positive
mind has already empirically observed that the theologico-
metaphysical problem of God is “devoid of meaning,” since it
is one of those “undiscussable hypotheses” of such “profound
inanity” that they “do not lend themselves to denial any more
than to affirmation.” Thus positive philosophy is unaware of
the existence of a real, personal God. It is aware that such a
myth can exist only in the imaginations of men. But having
passed far beyond that infantile state of man, positive progress
views the God-idea as the key idea in a cultural system that has
long ago been swept into oblivion by the winds of evolutionary
history.

From Atheism to Anti-theism

In his first letter to Comte, dated November 8, 1841, John
Stuart Mill, British empiricist, remarked that, despite the
openly anti-religious spirit of Comte’s work, that work was hav-
ing great influence among the different classes of savants in
England. In his reply to Comte’s first letter to him, dated
December 18, 1841, Mill explained why he, unlike Comte, had
to hide his own atheism, carefully keeping it out of his philoso-
phical works:

Doubtless you are not unaware of the fact that here in
England the writer who would openly profess anti-reli-
gious, nay more, anti-Christian, opinions would compro-
mise not only his social position, which I believe I could
sacrifice for a sufficiently noble cause, but also and more
seriously, his chances of being read. Already I am risking
much by carefully putting aside, from the very outset of
my work, any religious viewpoint, abstaining from de-
clamatory praises of providential wisdom, usually em-
ployed by the philosophers of my country, even by the
unbelievers. I rarely make allusions to this order of ideas,
endeavoring, above all, not to arouse in the ordinary
reader any religious antipathies. I believe I have written
in such a manner that no thinker, Christian or unbeliever,
can be mistaken about the genuine character of my opin-

Comte: Social Humanity as God 155

ions. I rely somewhat, I admit it, on a worldly prudence
which here in England prevents religious writers in gen-
eral from proclaiming unnecessarily the irreligion of the
scientific spirit of any value.®

Comte informed John Stuart Mill in a letter on July 14, 1845,
that he also did not take kindly to being called an atheist. But
the reasons for his displeasure at this appellation were not of
a prudential nature. Survival in a certain social status or fear
of being banned from a large readership were scarcely hazards
for the bold atheist writer in nineteenth-century, laicized
France. Comte objected that the name atheist “does not apply
to people like us in any but the strictly etymological sense.”
True enough, we scholars of science do not believe in God, but
we have no common cause with the metaphysicians who pro-
fess atheism. They dally with theism by constantly seeking the
origin of the world, of man, of the absolute moral law, nostalgi-
cally seeking forever their lost God. They would return to the
womb of theism. Thus the position of atheism is too puerile for
minds of our positive, scientific stamp. Atheism should never
harden into mere, sterile negativism. Like theism, it too should
be only a temporary experience, a transitional stage toward
progressive, systematic positivism. Nor did Comte reject the
name of atheist because he wanted to remain an agnostic, as
some scholars have claimed. For him it was never a question
of being unable to say Yes or No to the existence of God. His
writings leave no doubt about his decisions and thoughts about
the validity of God and supernatural religion. Just as he de-
spised mere negative atheism, so too he abhorred the paralysis
of agnosticism.

Comte was not, therefore, an ordinary atheist. He planned to
go beyond atheism through a positive program. His historical,
positivistic dialectic was aimed at delivering the coup de grâce
to a dying theologism. By marshaling a concatenation of em-
pirical sciences against theology, Comte was assured that his
mission to obliterate these myths would be eminently success-
ful. So thorough is Comte’s campaign to eliminate God as an
illusion of man’s arrested youth, so zealous and successful is

6. Collected Works Of John Stuart Mill; Vol. XIII, The Earlier Letters Of

John Stuart Mill, Edited by Francis E. Mineka, (University of Toronto Press:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 491-492.

156 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

that campaign, that Comte must be compared not to pale athe-
ists but to those famous, antitheistic God-killers—Feuerbach,
Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger. When his great synthesis is
completed, there will simply be no room for belief in God.
Ancient dogmas will have lost all their meaning; they will
consequently be forsaken as discredited, irrelevant myths,
hopelessly out of touch with the modern, advanced situation of
society. Thus, for Comte, mere atheism was too timid a stance
against God. It remained vulnerable to theistic counter-attacks;
it was a partial, an inadequate emancipation from the tyranny
of God. Since atheism is always rooted in the metaphysical
mode of thinking, it posed the threat of the return of an aveng-
ing God. For atheism is constantly reopening inquiries into
theoretical problems. The trouble with the eighteenth-century
atheists is that they argued their way merely to a denial of God;
they established no positive program to keep God banished
from human society. Comte himself would provide that posi-
tive program, the system of empirical and social sciences.
Comte’s system would provide the completely adequate eman-
cipation from God that man’s maturity demanded. He posed his
problem and indicated his solution in these words:

Although I have long denied any solidarity, whether dog-
matic or historical, between true positivism and what is
called atheism, I must, at this juncture, add a brief but
pointed explanation in regard to this mistaken notion.

Even in its intellectual aspect atheism represents no more
than an inadequate emancipation since it tends to pro-
long the metaphysical state indefinitely by continually
seeking new solutions of theoretical problems, instead of
ruling out all accessible researches as inherently fruitless.
The true positive spirit consists above all in perpetually
substituting the study of the invariable laws of
phenomena for the study of their causes properly so
called, whether first or final, or, to put it briefly, it seeks to
ascertain how rather than why. It is therefore incompati-
ble with the vainglorious musings of a vague atheism
about the formation of the universe, the origin of animals,
etc. So long as we persist in solving the questions proper
to our childhood, we are in a very bad position for rejecting
the naive method which our imagination brings to bear on
them and which is, indeed, the only one suited to their
nature. Thus confirmed atheists can be regarded as the

Comte: Social Humanity as God 157

most inconsistent of theologians, since they occupy them-
selves with the same questions but reject the only suitable
approach to them.’

Thus, even though atheism represents a natural, progressive
evolution in human thinking, Comte, prophet of the great West-
ern revolution, refuses to remain in this rut of negativism. His
positive program for the reconstruction of society calls for the
liquidation of “reactionary beliefs and anarchic dogmas,” a
preliminary necessity for human regeneration. In a spirit of
utter detestation, Comte let loose a stream of sarcastic ridicule
against “theological figments” and the reign of an effete God.
His plan was to bring about the dethronement of this decrepit
God who ruled despotically over “the long minority of man-
kind” through the instrumentality of organized religions, par-
ticularly Catholicism, all of which were presently rotten to the
core. The positivism of Comte was aimed at shocking atheists
forward into becoming anti-theists. The battle cry of their
regime of science would be: “Nothing is absolute, everything is
relative!” With God and his metaphysician-mourners driven
forever from the human predicament, a new spiritual power
would be free to unify mankind in universal maturity.

From Anti-theism to Religion Without. God

On August 1, 1842, Comte sent to the printer the sixth and
final volume of his vast work, Cours de Philosophie Positive.
The date is significant for it represents a turning point in the
life and work of the author. That same day his wife Caroline
left him forever. For seventeen years their tempestuous mar-
riage had been marred with countless dissensions, three sepa-
rations and now the final break. In fairness to Caroline, she
really tried to make the marriage a success and was responsible
for whatever degree of happiness it managed to have. She even
agreed to stay on, attending Comte’s needs under unbearable
conditions for their last two weeks, as he completed the sixth
volume. Recalling the final separation twelve years later
Comte wrote: “That day I felt terrible. I felt as if my health was
ready to break down and that I was to have the awful mental

7. Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, (Paris: Société Positiviste,
1912), pp. 73 and 88.

158 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

episode of 1826, as a result of similar conditions of disturbing
influences.”

Brilliant seminal philosopher that he was, as a person Comte
was impossible to live with. He was egotistical in the extreme,
violently self-willed and insanely jealous. He could not get
along with anyone, neither his colleagues, his publishers, his
students nor his wife. He hated all opinions and authority other
than his own. With his wife gone, he was alone, isolated socially
and academically in a world from which he had also banished
God. True, his just completed grand synthesis of positive phi-
losophy was destined to influence greatly the progress and
scientific thinking of the nineteenth century. But that was still
in the future. He was bitterly alienated, incapable of returning
thanks even in mere words to former loved ones. Yet his self-
confidence and conceit were colossal. He exulted in having
eliminated God as a vague, incoherent, even disastrous being.
He prided himself on having accomplished his intense passion
to destroy God.

Nevertheless, despite his extravagant, outrageous self-confi-
dence, Comte was uneasy and unhappy. He was refused reap-
pointment for a professorship at the Academy of Sciences in
1844. Idleness and isolation are scarcely the conditions for fur-
ther creative work. Without a job, without.followers or friends
on the continent, without income, without money, Comte was
forced to go begging to his friends in England through John
Stuart Mill. Arrogantly he suggested that his English disciples
should support him and thus grant him the financial freedom
he needed to continue his creative work of social reorganiza-
tion. Although Mill and his friends did send some funds, they
advised Comte frankly not to expect fund-raising to be a regu-
lar affair on his behalf. To help himself financially he could
take a boarder or write articles for English journals. Comte
accepted the funds, but indignantly rejected the advice of his
benefactors. He had other books to write. He was disturbed over
the possibility that the religious and metaphysical vacuum
which he had created might prove disastrous. Some new reality
and religion must fill the place vacated by God and play the role
formerly exercised by Christianity. As he had himself com-
plained often enough, pure atheism was sterile because it left
utterly frustrated the human needs satisfied by God and Chris-

Comte: Social Humanity as God 159

tianity. There was the real danger that if this vacuum were not
filled by positive doctrines and a positive religion, a new tran-
scendent God and supernatural religion would seize the soul of
humanity and its last state of imbecility would be worse than
its primitive or godless state.

It was at this time that an event happened in Comte’s life
which was to transfigure him from being historian-philosopher
into becoming “the High Priest of the Religion of Humanity,”
as John Stuart Mill expressed it. In April 1844, on a visit toa
friend’s hotel apartment in Paris, Comte met Madame Clotilde
de Vaux. Immediately he became Clotilde-intoxicated, forming
a passionate attachment to her. He admits that this attachment
caused a “moral regeneration” in him. This “angelic influ-
ence,” this “incomparable passion” aroused in him specula-
tions far superior to those of his positive philosophy. His
passion for Clotilde always remained in the courtyard of
friendship, though Comte was eager to marry the beautiful
lady. From Clotilde he gained the insight into the true source
of human happiness: “One cannot always think, but one can
always love.” Under the influence of this radiant lady, who
united in herself all that was morally and intellectually admi-
rable, human sentiment and love began to displace intellect as
the Lord of Comte’s being. Under the spell of this passionate
agony, Comte plunged into the work of his “second career,” the
revision of his philosophic system and its completion with his
system of love. When Clotilde was cut off by death a year after
their first meeting, Comte was at first inconsolable, but then
vowed to immortalize her before all the world. From then on
his speeches, lectures, books announced that Comte had be-
come the apostle of a new redemption of humanity under the
patronage of his Saint Clotilde, the perfect image of Humanity,
even as Dante’s Beatrice had been the perfect image of his
Philosophy. Comte wanted all men to love the human race, all
human beings, as he loved Clotilde. For Clotilde represented
the human tenderness Comte had been denied and had denied
himself all his life. Now, in her honor, he would transform the
philosophy of positivism into the religion of positivism; i.e., into
the religion of Humanity. His adoration of her memory effected
major changes in Comte’s personal character, sentiments,
speculations. Now Comte, the cold positive scientist came forth

160 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

from the flames of his grand passion as Comte the compassion-
ate lover and founder of the religion of humanity; the science
of humanity was replaced by the religion of humanity. As we
shall see in our examination of his system of religion, Clotilde’s
influence did ennoble and soften somewhat Comte’s character
and feelings, yet in the end, his passion for her seduced him
into a system of speculation and conduct that delivered him up
to lunacy.

Though he expanded his philosophy into a religion, Comte
did not bring back either the God of the Christians or their
theology. He did, however, draw his ideas of moral, hierarchi-
cal and sacramental discipline from the Catholic Church for
which he had great admiration, considering it the immediate
and necessary precursor of the Religion of Humanity. In fact,
he will attempt to make an alliance between Catholicism and
Positivism so as to graft its “social genius” onto the tree of
Positivism. The Religion of Humanity, therefore, is without a
God, or rather, Humanity is man’s new God. Man’s belief now
clings to Humanity, no longer to God, so that Comte has created
a religion without belief in God, a religion of the infidel. Instead
of squandering his efforts at worship on an illusory God, man
can now completely satisfy his religious appetite by directing
his thoughts, feelings and actions toward his own Humanity.
Soon, according to Comte’s prophecy, Paris will replace Rome
as the religious capital of the world and Notre-Dame the
basilica of St. Peter as “the great temple” of mankind. In Notre-
Dame the statue of Humanity will have as its pedestal the altar
of God and the fallen God himself will be its footstool. Thence-
forth each man’s obligations and devotions will be paid to this
“Grand Etre” which represents the real and ideal Humanity,
comprising the past, present and future of the Human Race
conceived as a continuous, progressing whole and holy Reality.
Worshiping a Collective Existence without knowable begin-
ning or end will revive in men that awesome feeling for the
infinite which represents a metaphysical hunger in man and
which formerly was satisfied by the Absolute Illusion. Thus will
the God of Abraham, of Jesus, of St. Paul, of the Christians be
replaced by the God of Humanity. And everywhere “the ser-
vants of Humanity” will either convert or drive out the ser-
vants, or rather, “the slaves of God.” On this point Comte was

Comte: Social Humanity as God 161

adamant. He excluded from positions of leadership in his king-
dom of Positivism “Catholics, Protestants and deists,” i.e., “all
the various slaves of God,” for they are troublesome and back-
ward forces. “While the Protestants and deists have always
attacked religion in the name of God, we must discard God,
once and for all, in the name of religion.”*

Comte’s religion is certainly not scientific; it is more a theory
of vitalism, a sort of mystical revelation, a lyrical image of the
“Grand Etre.” Its driving force is faith in, hope for and love
toward the human race. Guided by history, reflection and com-
passion, Comte feels the intimacy of the connection of every
age of humanity with every other. The great drama, the pro-
longed epic of man’s earthly destiny unites all generations in-
dissolubly into a single Great Being worthy of worship. To be
sure, Comte’s idea of what is worshipful Humanity is quite
different from Feuerbach’s idolized Humanity. Feuerbach divi-
nized the abstract species of Humanity and made Humanitas
Universalis worshipful. Comte’s Great Humanity, on the other
hand, is composed, in every age and condition, solely of those
who have lived worthy and noble lives. Thus only individuals
of character who throughout the ages have contributed by their
lives and accomplishments to the social advancement of
humanity are deserving of living man’s veneration. Unworthy
humans, criminals, even so-called great men like Nero, Robes-
pierre, Bonaparte and others—all who destroy human harmony
and hand down only disorder and hatred are excluded from
incorporation into Adorable Humanity. Whereas whoever has
assimilated and handed on the wisdom of the ages, whoever
has cooperated in the drama of man’s ascent to mature
Humanity—such giants live on in us and to such spiritual titans
do the living owe gratitude, reverence and worship. These are,
in the words of Comte, “the dead who govern more and more
those who are alive.” In Humanity, therefore, not in God, “do
we live and move and have our being.” Just as Feuerbach ad-
vised men not to return from their own Humanity to the God
of alienation, so Comte warned men not to leave the never
ending congregation of great men united in Humanity for the
God who formerly kept them as slaves. Men are to remain

8. Auguste Comte, Lettres inédites à C. de Bligniéres, Vol. 1, p. 107, quoted by
de Lubac, Drama Of Atheist Humanism, p. 101.

162 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

forever united in the only true religion, the religion of
Humanity.

The Cult of Humanity

In order to foster the Religion of Humanity as the only road
to salvation opened to mankind, Comte had to expose Chris-
tianity as the religion that led man down the road to serfdom,
depravity and destruction. Without delay he dismisses Chris-
tianity’s doctrines as myths devoid of all truth. He goes on to
concentrate his attacks against the spirit of Christianity, which
he contrasts and separates from Catholicism. Christianity is
hostile to the human race and the human condition. It begets
idlers, unnaturally preoccupied with death, indifferent to
earthly ideals, dreamers of happiness in the solitude of heaven.
Consequently, its ethics is egotistical, exaggerating the impor-
tance of the personal or individual to the detriment of the so-
- cial. Christianity is at bottom immoral because it is inherently
antisocial. And it is antisocial in two glaring ways. First it is
anarchic, making each man an absolute like God himself and
encouraging him to subordinate the world to his own ego. Sec-
ond, it is selfish, seeking isolated, personal sanctity and salva-
tion without regard to the welfare of Humanity at large. Why
even fetishism and polytheism were far more compassionately
social, for they kept the individual harmoniously blended into
the great social body working and motivated by altruistic
ideals. But Christianity sees society merely as an accidental
agglomeration of individuals, composed of transitory individu-
als obsessed exclusively with their private destiny. For Chris-
tians’ cooperation in the salvation of others is merely a means
for furthering their own salvific careers. Others are instru-
ments to be used or discarded in so far as they aid the ego. But
should one be surprised at this auto-erotic conduct of Chris-
tians? After all, “Christian egoism” is merely the image of
“Absolute egoism” modeled on the Absolute, Isolated, Inacces-
sible God. St. Peter epitomized Christian isolationism in one of
his hortatory maxims thus: “Let us look upon ourselves on
earth as strangers or pilgrims.” And St. Paul kept Christians in
a nomadic spirit of disengagement with these words: “We have
not here a lasting city, but we look for one which is to come.”

Comte: Social Humanity as God 163

Thus Christianity produces an army of individual pilgrims cau-
tiously, circumspectly seeking solitary salvation. It atrophies
man’s social instincts, his noblest powers, through failure to
exercise or satisfy them. Even when it urges men to love their
fellow men as themselves, Christianity provides an eminently
selfish motive for this love, thereby vitiating it too with the
spirit of egoism. Love others as yourself not from compassion
but for the sake of the love of God, of getting God on your side,
of possessing God. Thus Christianity begets cold, calculating
men, hermits wherever they are, in direct touch with Absolute
Being, unavailable to their fellow men, to social interests and
solidarities for the purposes of collective order. Is it any won-
der, therefore, if Christians are arrogant, rebellious, at base,
intellectual, social and religious anarchists? If history proves
anything, it proves that Christianity is responsible for the
chaotic revolution of our times, for the mystic enthusiasm that
is pitting man against man, nation against nation and the world
against Humanity.

Among the documents of Christianity criticized by Comte,
the Gospels came in for special scorn. He rejected them for “the
mental and moral void” which prevailed in them. Moreover,
reminiscent of Nietzsche’s wrath against Christ, Comte too dis-
played a shockingly jealous hatred for the person of Jesus. He
banned Christ from the Calendar of Positivist Saints, consider-
ing Him as “essentially a charlatan,” a religious adventurer,
the false prophet and founder of a false religion.’ Socrates and
Plato were likewise denounced as monotheists who had a de-
vastingly deleterious influence on mankind right up to the pre-
sent. Secretly such monotheists were aspiring to personal
deification under different guises, under the appellation of Son
of God, Troubadour of Wisdom or Herald of the Ideal.

St. Paul, on the other hand, Comte praises profusely, for he
prevented the contributions of Jesus to the Religion of
Humanity from being purely destructive. St. Paul is the golden
link between Catholicism and Positivism. He purged Christian-
ity of its selfishness and guided it through Catholicism toward
Positivism. He is on the Calendar of Positivist Saints, one of the
three—Caesar and Charlemagne being the other two—whose

9. Auguste Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste, Réédition, (Paris: Garnier, 1909),
pp. 11, 353, 358.

164 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

memory is given solemn worship annually. St. Paul is the great-
est precursor of Auguste Comte. His special merit is due first
to his enunciation of the doctrine of the perennial war that
rages between nature and grace. This valuable doctrine out-
lined the entire moral problem. For, fictional though it was, this
doctrine was nothing more than a provisional compensation
for monotheism’s radical incompatibility with the natural in-
stincts of benevolence and sympathy that impel all creatures
to mutual union among themselves rather than to isolationary
adhesion to their Creator. “The imaginary conflict between na-
ture and grace was thenceforth replaced by the real opposition
between the posterior mass of the brain, the seat of personal
instincts, and its anterior region, the distinct seat of the organs
for the sympathetic impulses and the intellectual faculties.” °

Secondly and in a more marvelously direct way, Paul an-
ticipated in feeling the true vision of Humanity in that inspir-
ing word-picture, “We are all members of one another.”
Thirdly, his teaching that true freedom is found in complete
submission was to become a fundamental law of the Religion
of Humanity. Such are some of the outstanding social doctrines
whereby St. Paul corrected the anarchic egoism of Christianity
and replaced it with the good news of a socially ordered Catho-
licism. Positivism, endowed with superior lucidity and equity
because of its doctrine of constant relativity, was destined by
history to call forth Paul from the shadows of the past and
reveal him to the present as the true founder of Positive reli-
gious principles improperly called Christian. To be sure, Paul
was responsible for history’s ignorance of his truly noble work.
The founding of Western monotheism required a “divine re-
vealer” who would announce and establish “the separation of
the two powers,” assigning Christian monotheism a temporal
role with spiritual power for the achievement of an eternal
destiny, while leaving to Caesar the management of this world.
But Paul, in his humility, preferred to be only an apostle, not a
divinized founder. He knew that the “divine revealer’s” role of
necessity called for “a mixture of hypocrisy and spellbinding,”
a role far below his noble spirit. Hence, Paul gladly left the first
place of founder to one of the adventurers who, in imitation of
pagan forerunners, often attempt to inaugurate monotheism

10. Ibid, p. 299.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 165

while claiming simultaneously to have attained personal deifi-
cation. Thus, with admirable abnegation, for the success of his
apostolic mission on behalf of monotheism, Paul consented to
accept with veneration a “bogus founder,” a man-made God as
the idealized architect of Western monotheism. Commenting
on Comte’s ingenious explanation of St. Paul’s conduct and
relationship to Jesus, de Lubac writes: “Evidently Comte was
not altogether devoid of a novelist’s imagination. St. Paul com-
ing to worship Jesus sincerely, because the latter saved him
from the necessity (always hateful to an upright man) of let-
ting himself be worshipped, is a pretty idea to have hit upon.
The great apostle was within an ace of infecting his admirer
with his own enthusiasm ... The latter, however, regained
possession of himself; it was sufficient for him to recognize ‘the
true though involuntary, usefulness’ of the part played by
Jesus, which was limited to dispensing Paul from the necessity
of self-deification, without, however, ceasing to fulfill the con-
dition essential to Western monotheism.”

Through Paul, then, the monotheistic tradition of Christian-
ity, which was initially narrowed and hardened in egoism,
thawed and socially expanded its character. Under the leaven
of Paul’s social doctrines egotistical Christianity expanded to
the nobility of compassionate Catholicism. And the manner of
development was rather startling. For under the aspect of ap-
parent continuity, Christianity, perhaps the worst form of reli-
gious egoism, evolved into its opposite, Catholicism, a good
form of religious sociality. Now, with the advent of Comte him-
self, Pontiff of Positivism, Catholicism would evolve still fur-
ther into its opposite. Though socially superior to Christianity,
Catholicism was still infected with its egotistical, absolutist,
One God. Comte was determined to eliminate the God of Catho-
licism, immanentize its mission in temporal power and politi-
cal wisdom, after having rejected Christ and the Gospels. Once
monotheistic Catholicism was transformed into its opposite,
atheistic Catholicism, its faith and doctrines would evaporate,
its morals would be thoroughly rinsed of any supernatural
stains and its institutions and authoritative structure would be
reestablished in the most social of all religious realities, the
Religion of Humanity. Thus would be accomplished the evolu-

11. Henri de Lubac, S.J., Tke Drama Of Atheist Humanism, p. 112.

166 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tion of the worst religion into the best. Corruptio pessimi op-
tima, from Christianity to Catholicism to Positivism. And the
cure of souls would pass into the mission and jurisdiction of the
positivist clergy. “The more I scrutinize this immense subject,
the more I am confirmed in the feeling which I already had
twenty years ago, at the time of my work on the spiritual power,
that we systematic positivists are the true successors of the
great medieval men, taking over the social work from where
Catholicism has brought it.”!? Comte, in a word, planned to
incorporate into his own religion everything that was true and
useful in Catholicism, everything, that is, except its dogmas.
The religion of Humanity was to make use of the organization,
regime, worship, cathedrals, even clergy if possible, of the
Catholicism of the Middle Ages. How did Comte plan to effect
this marvelous transformation? Was a desecrated, desacral-
ized, secularized Catholicism, now known as the Religion of
Humanity possible? For Auguste Comte is was a thrilling, real-
izable, messianic mission.

We have already seen that the High Priest of Humanity was
enthralled with the social genius and organization of the Cath-
olicism of the Middle Ages. Its greatest human achievement,
“the miracle of Papal hegemony,” had been established in
those days. The splendor of the Catholic feudal system had
been the work of Charlemagne and Hildebrand. But it had its
roots in the Catholic priesthood, product of Paul’s genius,
which had perseveringly built itself up over the ages of
anarchy during the Christian persecutions and emerged so
strong that it went on to construct the incomparable social
masterpiece called Catholicism. Founded on the separation yet
mutual cooperation between the two powers, the medieval
unity represented “Catholic organization, Catholic constitu-
tion, Catholic systematisation” at its best. Society was unified
and sanctified by the spiritual teaching power of the Church
and ruled effectively in peace by the political power of the
Christian kings. Evangelical anarchy was conquered by the
theologically omni-competent papal oracle; political anarchy
by the all-powerful royal throne.

Yet there already existed within this monotheistic monolith

12. Auguste pats, Lettres d'Auguste Comte a John Stuart Mill (1841-1845)
(Paris: 1877), p.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 167

doctrinal and liturgical currents which could breach the for-
tress of faith in One God and lead on to the eventual establish-
ment of the Religion of Humanity. Comte proves to be a man
of masterful imagination at discovering and linking up doc-
trines of Catholicism which are heralds of Humanity’s reli-
gious apotheosis in Positivism. There is, for example, the
‘doctrine of the Incarnation. In a more sublime degree than any
previous polytheistic mystery, this mystery unites mankind
with the Absolute God and thus already manifests “our growing
tendency towards a real homogeneity between worshippers
and worshipped.” A formerly isolated trinity is now indwelling
in Humanity. This communal homogeneity is further advanced
through participation in the mystery in which each man takes
the body of the Deity into his own body. Thus the God of Catho-
licism is slowly being assimilated into the God-Humanity, the
God of Positivism. Then, too, the cult of the saints moves to-
wards the displacement of the worship of the One God by the
worship of the many great Humans, the worship of Humanity.
What we have here is a form of polytheism evolving into the
cult of Humanity. But, if the cult of the saints revived polythe-
ism for the sake of Positivism, the worship of the Virgin—the
highest poetic creation of Catholicism—introduced an even
more radical break with monotheism. For “this sweet creation
of the Virgin” reintroduced fetishism, thereby disposing souls
in a wonderful manner for “positive worship.” The Virgin-
Mother becomes the truly human mediatrix of Humanity. She,
not the Eucharist, is the bridge of transition from Catholicism
to Positivism. The image of the Virgin-Mother is the prototype
of the Goddess of Positivism, Humanity.

Thus far we have briefly treated the Comtian version of the
evolution of religion from Christianity to Positivism. Now we
must give some of the details of the Comtian cult of Humanity.
“The necessary basis of the human order is the entire subordi-
nation of man to Humanity,” according to Comte.’* For man is
and lives through Humanity. The Human Race, therefore,
should be the focus of all his speculations, affections and wor-
ship. The human race is the new Supreme Being, composed of
“its own worshippers, substituting herself for God.” Positive
worship begins with the worship of Humanity and proceeds to

13. Auguste Comte, Synthèse Subjective, p. 24.

168 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

develop into a Positivist Trinity by means of the principle of
fetishism. “A trinity which admits of no change” guides “our
conceptions and our adoration, both always relative, first to the
Great Being, then to the Great Fetish and lastly to the Great
Environment.”?4

The Great Fetish is the Earth, which is alive with a blind,
profligately generous will, anxious to nourish all men copi-
ously. The Great Environment is Space, that animated recepta-
cle which kindly receives in a passively blind way all the
phenomena of destiny. Man is obliged to adore all three living
members of this trinity. The unity of the three and their ser-
vices to men should dispose the positivist faithful to cultivate
the sentiment of sympathy by developing in themselves grati-
tude for whoever serves the Great Being, Humanity. Though he
called these poetic fables at first, Comte wanted his followers
to take them as real beliefs eventually, because they would
develop sympathetic emotions and aesthetic inspirations,
thereby “perfecting our unity”. Commenting on Comte’s fan-
tastic teachings and fetish-worship, Maritain writes: “The
spectacle of the high priest of humanity warming up his sym-
pathetic instincts, and those of his disciples, at the fire of his
own laboriously combined fables, and offering his and their
hearts to imaginary, deliberately invented beings, is a remark-
able indication of the degradation to which the intellect could
be exposed in the nineteenth century.”!5

Now there were private as well as public devotions in the
Church of Comte. Private prayer was not a matter of address-
ing the Great Being or petitioning favors of it. It rather con-
sisted in a mere outpouring of feeling. And it was practiced in
two activities: a commemoration followed by effusion. In com-
memoration, the memory and imagination summoned up in all
their vividness the image and life of the physically absent per-
son. In the effusion that followed this realistic reproduction,
each person could use his own formulas, positions of reverence
in his prayerful observances which were to last two hours ev-
ery day, divided into three parts: at rising, in the middle of the
working hours and in bed at night. Such daily worship Comte
paid to Clotilde de Vaux for thirteen and one half years after

14. Ibid, p. 24,
15. Jacques Maritain, Moral Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), p. 324.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 169

her death. He felt that all men should love and worship the
human race as he loved and worshipped his Clotilde, who was
the glorified image of Humanity. The spectacle of the Pontiff
of Positivism, on his knees before the armchair and bouquet of
flowers—a relic of the happy, Wednesday visits of Clotilde—
reviving with intense concentration her radiant figure and
then rekindling his emotions to exalted stages of elation, is one
of the most tragic examples in all history of a genius’s loss of
mental health, clearly traceable to his rejection of the God of
reason and revelation.'®

The public cultus of the Religion of Humanity was also well
organized. It consisted of eighty-four festivals a year, with at
least one a week devoted to the progressive glorification of
Humanity. For Comte, who exhibited a delirium for directing
human life under the reign of sentiment with the same cosmic
regularity that guided stars and planets, there had to be in-
stituted nine instead of seven sacraments. These sacraments
were nine solemn consecrations, performed by the priests of
Humanity, of the great transitional stages in life: birth, educa-
tion, marriage, choice of a profession and so forth. Even death

16. “As soon as he rose, at half-past five, he prayed for an hour, a prayer made
up of a commemoration and a great pouring forth of sentiments. The com-
memoration lasted for forty minutes. Comte, kneeling before the armchair-
altar, would evoke Clotilde’s image, recite some verses in her honor and relive
in thought.and in chronological order, the whole year of happiness he had lived
withher...The pouring forth of sentiments would last twenty minutes. Comte,
kneeling before Clotilde’s flowers, would first of all evoke her image and would
recite some Italian verses, then he would arise and come closer to the altar and,
standing, he would address invocations to his beloved in which he mixed the
language of the mystics with the expressions of his love. He would say to her:
‘One, union, continuity; two, ordering, combination; three, evolution, succes-
sion... man becomes more and more religious—submission is the foundation
of authority.—Good-bye, my chaste eternal companion.—Good-bye, my beloved
pupil and worthy colleague. Good-bye sister. Good-bye dear daughter. Good-bye
chaste spouse! Good-bye holy mother! Virgin mother, daughter of your son,
good-bye. Addio sorella. Addio cara figlia. Addio casta sposa, addio sancta
madre! Virgine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, addio.’ Then he would kneel again
and with open eyes would repeat some sentences from the beginning of the
commemoration. Finally, on his knees before the altar-chair in its slip-cover,
he would invoke Clotilde again, speak to her and would repeat three times:
‘Amem te plus quam me, nec me nisi propter te!’ At ten-thirty, the same cere-
mony would begin again and would last twenty minutes; this was the prayer
for the middle of the day...
“Finally, in the evening, a new commemoration which he made sitting up in
bed, a new pouring forth of sentiments once he had lain down, and always the
same thanksgiving, the same verses, the same mystical sentence from the
Imitation of Christ.” George Dumas, Psychologie des Deux Messies Positivistes,
Saint-Simon et Auguste Comte (Paris: Alcan, 1905), pp. 214-216.

170 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

was sanctified by a sacrament, called the sacrament of trans-
formation, for it was considered as the passage from objective
to subjective existence—the living in the memory of our fellow
creatures. Personal immortality in eternity was denied by the
religion of Positivism. The good Positivists who have died are
sufficiently recompensed by being gathered up into the collec-
tive adoration of the Great Being. This is the only kind of im-
mortality—existence in the posthumous adoration of mankind
at large—that is professed by the Religion of Humanity. Then,
seven years after death, the last sacrament may be adminis-
tered. It is a form of canonization and consists in a public judg-
ment by the priesthood of Humanity on the merits and memory
of the dead. Those judged and found worthy, as a result of their
outstanding lives, of further honors are then solemnly incorpo-
rated with the Great Being and their remains are publicly
transferred from their civil to their religious resting place—“to
the sacred grove which ought to encircle each temple of
Humanity.”

It would be useless to enter at length into further details of
the Comtian cult of Humanity. Essentially an organizer, Comte
had a mania for minute regulations and prescriptions. Spon-
taneous living shriveled under his breath and freedom fled at
his touch. Sufficient is it to indicate that Comte had guardian
angels too—Clotilde, his chaste companion, Rosalie Boyer, his
venerable mother and Sophie Bliot, his servant—glorified by
him. All the faithful of Positivism were to be aided by similarly
chosen angels. Then there was the Positivist calendar of the
saints, which recorded those who had received the ninth sacra-
ment, that of incorporation. Moreover, Comte fostered the wor-
ship of the Virgin-Mother, as the ideal limit upward, above
sexual instinct, of womanhood which perpetuates human life
in a holy social function. Marriages were held to be rigidly
indissoluble—except for the cause of conviction of crime—for
the family was held as the essential type of all society. Second
marriages were not permitted and married couples had to take
a vow of eternal widowhood. Here was an absolute monogamy
rendered irrational by an odd, Manichean twist. Indeed the
whole dogma and liturgy of the Religion of Humanity is full of
sayings and doings that leave one flabbergasted. Assessing
somewhat its extravagant ideas, de Lubac writes:

Comte: Social Humanity as God 171

Objectively, this religious system is an illusionism; subjec-
tively, is his religious life anything but an illusion put into
practice? Clotilde was for her worshipper the symbol of
Humanity; but was not Humanity, in so far as it provoked
all these effusions, chiefly an irradiation of Clotilde? .. .
Comte was one of those men who, as the saying goes,
“grow devout as they grow grey.” A vulgar expression, but
is not the reality vulgar too? ... Apart from all question of
dogma, one cannot take seriously the musings of a man
who never understood a word of the Gospel and who sank
deeper, every day, into a monstrous egocentricity; the
crude and lachrymose “consolations” to which Comte in-
nocently abandoned himself in his sanctuary cannot be
taken for genuine spirituality.”

The Ethics of Atheistic Altruism

In characterizing any system of ethics it is necessary to in-
vestigate the philosophical] thought upon which it is based and
out of which it evolved. For morality, as a class of values or
code of conduct or quest of destiny, is really the prolongation
of metaphysical convictions into practical life. Normally, the
logos, or controlling principle of one’s adherence to truth,
becomes enfleshed in one’s daily activities. Allowing for fallen
man’s periodic failures through wickedness or weakness, a
man convinced he is made for absolute truth will usually try to
fulfill his obligation to seek and speak the truth. In the case of
Comte, as we have already seen, there exists no constant, in-
flexible, absolute cause—no who or why—of the universe of
beings. Thus, there exists no absolute truth, no unchanging
principles of being, no metaphysics. There exists only a phe-
nomenal order of related beings which give up only relative
truths. “Everything is relative, that’s the only absolute princi-
ple,” Comte had written while constructing his scientific sys-
tem of positivism. Thus, for Comte, metaphysics had passed
into oblivion as a science. Today’s truth may be false tomorrow.
Truth as such is relative; it is mutable. There is no assertion
which is absolutely true. Lévy-Bruhl, in his work on Comte, has
written that positive philosophy “abandons the chimera of un-
changeable truth. It does not consider today’s truth as abso-

17. Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Drama Of Atheist Humanism, pp. 135-136.
18. Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, Vol. IV, Appendix, p. ii.

172 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

lutely true, nor yesterday’s truth as absolutely false. It ceases
to be critical towards the whole of the past.”!9

Now a morality flowing from the total relativity of truth
must itself be totally relative. It is not surprising, therefore, to
discover that Comte holds that all moral values are relative.
Already as a young man he had written: “It is no longer a mat-
ter of carrying on endless discussions to determine which is the
best government; absolutely speaking, there is nothing good,
there is nothing bad; everything is relative, that’s the only thing
absolute; so far as social institutions are concerned everything
is especially relative to time.”2° Comte had here caught hold of
a valid insight. The dimension of time does help to form values.
As one of the molding circumstances of a human act, it contrib-
utes to the reasonableness or irrationality, the good or evil of
acts which by themselves are indifferent morally. But though
circumstances modify the morality of certain human acts,
there remain many human acts which are good or evil in them-
selves and no time or circumstances will change them. Every-
thing is not subject to time nor measured by it. The value of
some human actions are valued as good or evil beyond the
dimension of time. They are transcendentally good or evil. It is
not true, therefore, to say that absolutely speaking there is
nothing good, nothing bad; that everything is relative to our
time. Comte’s absolutizing of his own principle of relativity is
a contradiction in terms that reveals the irrationality of his
position. Writing about these Comtian inconsistencies, Mari-
tain says:

Moreover, as a matter of fact Comte could not and did not
hold to his principle. For him it is an absolute truth that
the positive state is the definitive state of humanity. He
holds as an absolute truth the law of the three stages,
whose necessity derives from the nature of the human
mind and is demonstrated on that basis. He holds it as an
absolute truth that the edifice of the positive sciences
must be crowned by sociology. He holds as an absolute
truth the necessity of completing the objective synthesis
with the subjective synthesis, and the positivist reorgani-
zation of knowledge with the positivist reorganization of
religion. He holds it as an absolute truth that political

19. Lévy-Bruhl, La philosophie d’Auguste Comte (Paris: Alcan), pp. 87-88.
20. Auguste Comte, in Revue Occidentale, May 1884, p. 331.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 173

unity is chimerical unless it is based on intellectual unity,
and that every reform of social institutions has as a prior
condition the reform of philosophy, of religion and of edu-
cation. There is not the least trace of relativity in his certi-
tude that future generations will bless his name and his
work. Always he is dogmatizing, retrenching, regenerat-
ing, excommunicating, reconciling, pontificating. As a
matter of fact no one is more absolutist than this herald
of relativity.”

With this in mind, let us examine briefly the Comtian ethics
of altruistic atheism. The science of sociology had demon-
strated to man that the social, human community—Humanity
—is the Great Being which is advancing society, through the
tragedies of history, to the unity of communal maturity. Now
the whole mission of religion is to cooperate with this progres-
sive advancement. The social good of the human race becomes,
thus, the ultimate standard of good and evil. Moral discipline
consists positively in developing as highly as possible the sym-
pathetic instinct that will lead men to sacrifice themselves to
the social good. Negatively, moral goodness consists in cultivat-
ing utter repugnance to egotistical instincts and actions. The
golden rule of Comtian ethics is: “Vivre pour autrui,” To live
for the other. To love our neighbor as ourself is evil because
selfish. We should endeavor not to love ourselves at all! Thomas
a Kempis enunciated the perfect moral law of the religion of
Humanity. “Amem te plus quam me, nec me nisi propter te!”
That I may love Thee more than myself, nor love myself save
for Thee!” All moral education and discipline have one pur-
pose: to guarantee the conquest of egoism by altruism. How did
Comte plan to accomplish this noble end?

Well, since no great society has ever maintained or developed
itself as a moral power without a disciplinary force of some
caliber, Comte established in his fellowship of Humanity anew
priesthood. “The positive priesthood,” the “spiritual priesthood
of Humanity” was to direct the moral development of the faith-
ful of Humanity. But on whose heads, among all the members
of this Church, would the ordaining hands be laid? Why, on the

21. Jacques Maritain, Moral Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), pp.
286-287.

22, Auguste Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste, Réédition, (Paris: Garnier, 1909),
p. 35.

174 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

heads of the scientists, of course! The godless, positivist clergy
was to be recruited from the “masters of synthesis who would
direct students of synthesis in the positivist schools attached as
a regular thing to the temples of Humanity.” A long scientific
training is demanded for those who will one day govern the
Church of Humanity. But only such scientists as evince a scien-
tific spirit of integration must be advanced to the priestly ca-
reer. Comte rejects as intellectually narrow those scientists
who specialize or who gather empty learning by mechanically
accumulating facts. The real scientist worthy of the priesthood
is the one who subordinates analysis to synthesis, progress to
order, egoism to altruism. Moreover, the priest-scientists
should be men of encyclopaedic minds, avoiding aridity by syn-
thesizing in themselves the various branches of learning, along
with poetry and philosophy. Using the principles and privileges
of relativity, the scientist-priests should propound truths which
answer the needs of the heart over those of the head. Having
become master synthesists, they should strive also to become
synergists in the service of sympathy.

The priests of Humanity are to be supported by endowments
voted by the State but administered by themselves. They are to
be excluded from riches, from political power but must rule
their own households as masters. They may not inherit, nor
receive stipendia from any other functions, neither from writ-
ings nor teachings. They are to live solely on their small sala-
ries, maintaining the complete disinterestedness needed to
counsel and guide the faithful wisely. To win over the masses,
they must be poor like the masses. Up to the age of thirty-five,
they are allowed to change their careers from theorist to practi-
tioner and vice versa.

The dictates of the Religion of Humanity indicate the tasks
that the priesthood of Humanity must perform. They are to
establish doctrinal unity and ethical harmony. They decide
what must be taught and thought. They must require of the
faithful blind faith in their dogmatic and moral doctrines. Per-
suasion should first be used to win over the critical, but if that
fails, stronger measures like social ostracism or economic boy-
cott or eventually eviction from the Church may have to be
applied. There is no free thought nor free conscience in the
regime of positivism. Being in the definitive state of man’s

Comte: Social Humanity as God 175

maturity, men have no longer any need for revolutionary theol-
ogy. The old beliefs have been surpassed; all is new, final and
fixed in the positive millenium. The principle of intellectual
criticism is now the forbidden fruit that will introduce anarchy
into the paradise of positivism. The new priesthood must,
therefore, guard against the return of the scourge of metaphy-
sics. Total emancipation and total subjugation are simultane-
ous realities in the society of Humanity, the former from the
Catholic, the latter to the Positivist faith.

And what are the priests of Humanity to do in fostering the
faith? “All the precepts of Catholicism regarding the submis-
sion of reason to faith are so many programs to be carried out.”
“We must not lessen them but go beyond them,” says Comte.”
Moreover, one need no longer fear the total submission of rea-
son to faith for it is equivalent in Positivism to the total submis-
sion of the mind to the heart, of personal to social instincts, of
man to Humanity. Already in his Cours de philosophie positive
when he was systematizing man’s objective world, Comte had:
revealed his mind concerning critical opposition to his doc-
trines. “The social order will always be incompatible with per-
manent freedom to reopen, at will, an indefinite discussion of
the very foundations of society.” Therefore, “systematic toler-
ance cannot exist and has never really existed except in con-
nection with opinions regarded as indifferent or doubtful.”2*

In his Systéme de politique positive when he was organizing
man’s subjective world, Comte drew the rigorous conclusions
of his former principle and applied them to the discipline of his
religion. Contrasting scientists and believers in his new
Church, Comte taught that the priest-scientists had demon-
strated knowledge of the dogmas of the positive faith. Hence
they needed faith less than the unlearned faithful. They were
to be the spiritual fathers who could demonstrate the faith to
wavering minds. But it would be unreasonable for the people to
demand that everything be proven. The faithful must be will-
ing to believe spontaneously and practice faithfully the truths
of positivism even without demonstration and full understand-
ing or any understanding at all. This disposition of total trust

23. Auguste Comte, Lettres à Henri Dix Hutton, 767, quoted by de Lubac, S.J.,
in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, p. 140.

24. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive as quoted by de Lubac, S.J.,
Ibid., p. 142.

176 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

is absolutely fundamental for a mature social order. Believers
must venerate their priesthood and submit with love to the
discipline of blind faith, eschewing useless discussion which
leads only to anarchic doubt and obfuscation. In true submis-
siveness of mind the believer must obey the authority of the
priest.

And that authority is not meant by Comte to be an empty
word. He puts teeth into authority. For when spurned and dis-
obeyed, it must know how to enforce its commands. Action
must complete its convictions. Comte advises that all the con-
duct of the believers be subjected “to examination by an inexo-
rable priesthood.” Heresy, as a perversion, must be mercilessly
purged from the body of the Church. The priests are to unmask
“false adherents” to the Comtian religion and thus root out that
“revolutionary malady” which pits arrogant, individual infalli-
bility against the valid teachings of the official hierarchy of the
Church of Humanity. The priests too, even with their “scien-
tific faith,” must also practice the virtue of veneration as the
clearest sign of their priestly vocation. Moreover, their spirit of
veneration will be an unmistakable proof of their devoted loy-
alty to the Founder, First High Priest and Supreme Spokesman
of Humanity, their Pontiff, Auguste Comte. Indeed, all, priests
and people, owe to the Pontiff of Positivism, absolute obedience
in thought, heart and deed, for he alone has the power to bind
and loose the faithful.

The Despotism of Atheistic Humanity

Every idol measures its worshippers. Moloch, devouring slain
and burning children, revealed the ghastly depravity and mad
idolatry of its faithful. No greater calamity can afflict a people
than its rejection of a worship that transcends, in wonder and
reverence, to the all-holy God. For every idol is a total tyrant;
it demands everything of its victim, self-immolation to the ex-
tremity of annihilation. And the idol of Humanity is no excep-
tion for there are no idols friendly to man. Moreover, the true
God, dethroned, cannot for long leave behind a vacant throne.
A dead God does not extinguish the line of deities. Nor can a
rejected faith long remain without a replacement. The Com-
tian city, consequently, with its god-idol, Humanity, was des-

Comte: Social Humanity as God 177

tined to become a compound of cosmic confinement for all men
who would be ruled by a “sociocracy” under the guidance of
“sociolatry.” Indeed, the idol of Humanity imposed upon its
citizens a thoroughly harsh, arrogant, intellectual dictatorship.
The priests of Humanity were obligated to think for their disci-
ples. Every man was called upon to bow down blindly before the
superior minds of his fellow men, the scientist-priests. And this
submission, one of total obedience and veneration, was to com-
mit the whole man, from his inner depths to his overt actions,
to these oracles of Humanity. In this era of Humanity the prin-
ciple of intellectual criticism was forever proscribed as the
anarchic enemy of the instincts of the heart. Indeed, the faith-
ful must acquire a suspicion and even hatred for scientific or
purely intellectual enterprises. The mortal sin and political
crime in the “sociocracy” of Auguste Comte was to practice the
art of abstraction and ratiocination. And to control this heinous
activity, Comte, Pontiff of the Religion of Humanity, had to set
controls to the reading of his subjects. He selected one hundred
volumes of science, philosophy, poetry, history and general
knowledge. These were to satisfy every positivist mind. All
other books, newspapers, periodicals might quite profitably be
consigned to the flames. The faithful ought to imitate the ex-
ample of their Pope. The great regenerator of Humanity had
adopted a rule to which he very rarely made exception. He
abstained systematically from newspapers, periodicals, scien-
tific publications, from all reading whatever except a few fa-
vorite poets in ancient and modern European languages. This
abstinence he practiced for the sake of mental health. By re-
stricting themselves to those one hundred books the faithful
would also enjoy the benefits of this “kygiéne cérébrale.”
Despite his doctrine that everything is relative, Comte dis-
plays a towering intolerance of anything that he does not ap-
prove. The great regenerator of Humanity, looking around at
the animal] and vegetative kingdoms, went on to suggest that all
species of these beings not useful to man should be systemati-
cally annihilated. Of course, he who could not produce nor re-
produce a single species, would determine which were useless
and had to be eradicated. Amused at the arrogance of the regen-
erator of Humanity, John Stuart Mill observed: “Mankind have
not yet been under the rule of one who assumes that he knows

178 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

all there is to be known, and that when he has put himself at
the head of humanity, the book of human knowledge may be
closed ... He does not imagine that he actually possesses all
knowledge, but only that he is an infallible judge of what
knowledge is worth possessing.”*> This naive intolerance of the
infallible judge of the Church of Humanity is most instructive.
It clearly proves that intolerance is not the particular privilege
of those who believe in the Absolute God. At least these latter
respect the natural and supernatural mysteries of life, thereby
admitting man’s infinite intellectual horizon and permitting
the ennobling activity of reflection and speculation in wonder-
ment about the transcendent. But Auguste Comte, on the other
hand, has decreed the end of all mysteries forever and for
everyone, thereby gluing the gaze of mankind in horror on the
Moloch of Humanity. It is this idol of Humanity that extin-
guishes and devours the minds of its worshippers. So much for
the intellectual dictatorship of atheistic Humanity.

It cannot be recalled enough that the positivist redeemer of
mankind not only wanted to do man’s thinking for him, but
would also teach man how to love. Love for him has its source
solely in the feeling of sympathy and the instincts of sociabil-
ity. The feeling of love is, therefore, autonomous, welling up in
man independent of and, indeed, often in opposition to his in-
tellect. But what could a love whose source is thoroughly di-
vorced from intelligence achieve? The answer is that love,
severed from its head in reason, becomes a mad tyrant. Because
love is solely oriented toward the other, toward society, it calls
for man to exercise perfect hatred toward himself. Men should
endeavor to starve all personal desires, denying themselves all
subjective gratifications. This, at first, sounds like enlightened
asceticism until we hear Comte exhorting his priesthood of
Humanity to deaden personal passions and propensities by de-
suetude. After all, organs are strengthened by use and atro-
phied by disuse. Women and priests “will accomplish the entire
abandonment of wine and other physical stimulants when ali-
mentation has become sufficiently nutritious.” This idea is odd
enough, yet reasonable compared with what follows. What Ma-
ritain calls Comte’s “headless love” soon demands the impossi-

25. John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte And Positivism, (The University of
Michigan Press: an Ann Arbor Paperback, 1961), pp. 180-181.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 179

ble, total abstinence from the use of sex! “It is possible,” he
encourages his sociological priests, “to effect if not the atrophy,
at any rate the inaction of that instinct now stimulated unduly
by the brain.” Comte has come a long way from his dissolute
youth; he has developed into a love-intoxicated celibate in the
twilight of his “second career” and would subject his followers
of all ages to his own unnatural asceticism.

It should be reported too that the tyranny of Comte’s decapi-
tated love renders the practice of the virtue of justice impossi-
ble. In the Church of Humanity individuals have no rights
whatsoever; they merely have duties and all their happiness
will be attained in the fulfillment of their social duties. Well,
then, if no one has any personal rights, no one has any claim
on others to respect his person. Thus, social sympathy for oth-
ers is totally arbitrary and not obligatory. It will be guaranteed
merely by the holy influences of the positive religion, the
priest-scientists and the regenerator of Humanity. Comtian
love is decapitated because it is cut off from God, from reason
and from the individual person. Such love is an amazingly con-
tradictory activity. Though thoroughly atheistic, it attempts to
adore tenderly the idol of Humanity while leaving no room in
man to love his own being and destiny. But how can a love
which hates self-being, be directed in love to other beings? The
attempt is doomed to failure.

The tragedy of such“headless love” is that it never discovers
others. Decapitated love has lost its reason and direction. It
cannot tend toward others as persons with rights, but only to-
ward them as objects for social sentiment and services. As Ga-
briel Marcel has indicated, unless the other is encountered as
a “thou” and not as an “it,” love becomes impossible. But in
order to discover the other as a “thou,” love must be founded on
and guided by reason. Love must see, through the spiritual light
of reason, the goodness of the “thou” before it can embrace the
“thou” in its gift of self-donation. True love is the intelligent,
free mutual self-donation and reception of the “I-Thou” em-
brace. There is no true love in the Religion of Humanity. For
the idol of Humanity demands not intelligent, free, gift-giving
of persons, but the exercise of sentimental hedonism toward
itself. This is an abortive counterfeit of love.

Moreover, a love that does not complete and consummate

180 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

justice is a mere sentimental effusion which enslaves man in
a degrading manner to the object of his effusion. And this is
what happens to the citizens of the Comtian kingdom. “The
idea of right,” writes Comte, “has to disappear from the politi-
cal, as the idea of cause from the philosophical domain. For
both notions refer to wills above discussion ... All human rights
are as absurd as they are immoral. As divine right no longer
exists, the notion must pass completely away, as relating solely
to the preliminary state, and directly incompatible with the
final state, which admits only duties, as a consequence of func-
tions.””6

Thus, Comte more thoroughly than most philosophers, radi-
cally expels the notion of natural law, denying that human
individuals possess by nature any rights whatsoever. And his
priests, though vowing never to seize temporal or political
power in the kingdom of Humanity, effectively gain just such
power through the weapon of despotic love. They govern souls
and direct the political powers with motivations arising from
the primacy of this “headless love,” pointing the way to the
purely temporal millenium of the Comtian kingdom with this
ery of their High Priest of Humanity: “Love for principle, Order
for basis, and Progress for end.”” In such a manner does the
great idol of Humanity strip the hearts of its worshippers of
their rights to invoke justice and subject them mercilessly to
the Sisyphean fate of performing loveless, meaningless duties.

The Lessons of Sociolatry

The religion of Humanity is thus seen to be a form of fetish
worship. Comte wanted it that way because the fetishistic atti-
tude toward nature is realized as a religion of feeling, not at all
of intelligence. Comte was convinced that his fetishism would
cultivate universal love. However, historical experience dem-
onstrates that fetishism cultivates universal fear. The supersti-
tion of the fetishist makes him believe that his fetish is alive,
can help him in war, cure him of diseases, grant him prosperity
or afflict him with evils. The degrading effect of fetishism con-
sists in forcing man to such irrational conduct, to such an an-

26. Catéchisme Positiviste, Réédition, pp. 298-300.
27. Ibid, p. 59.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 181

tagonism to the true knowledge of nature. Yet Comte insisted
on a marriage of fetishism and Positivism! And their offspring
was a sociocracy ruled by the dictatorship of an atheistic priest-
hood. Poor positivist sinners were made to feel the full weight
of its “real coercive power.” Sinners are subjected to the severe
judgment of an.inexorable priesthood. In the presence of mem-
bers of their families, before relatives and friends summoned
together for the occasion, they are scolded and warned about
their critical views. Should this measure fail to convert the
wayward, a public censure is pronounced against them in the
temple of Humanity. If even this severe punishment proves
inefficacious, the ultimate weapon is used against the hardened
sinners. They are sent into social excommunication either for
a time or forever. And this is done “in the name of the Great
Being” before whom “the absolute unworthiness of the false
servants is solemnly proclaimed.” Such false brethren are thus
rendered incapable of sharing in the duties and benefits of
human society. Continually exposed to the “examination of an
inflexible priesthood,” the faithful must live an open, totally
socialized existence. Religious and social privacy are banned
and the Great Being becomes the Big Brother. Informers, func-
tioning everywhere, are encouraged to report to the priesthood
what may be amiss with their brethren. The Great Being’s eyes
and ears snoop into every phase of human endeavor, thereby
suffocating every sigh for freedom. Thus, decapitated Comtian
love, i.e., love without justice, becomes a tyrant and destroys
the society it planned to ennoble. The idol of Humanity
becomes man’s most inhuman god. Its theological dogma and
its liturgical functions can be said to have created a form of
cannibalistic narcissism. For both are based on the cruel creed
that the great social god, Humanity, progressively matures the
more voraciously it feeds on its self-immolating members. Is
this messianic, atheistic religion, which worships the great So-
cial Whole, an unattainable myth? Not in the designs of Au-
guste Comte. Listen to the High Priest issuing militant orders
to his godless priesthood:

Seize hold of the world of society, for it belongs to you, not
according to any law but because of a manifest duty, rest-
ing on your exclusive capacity to direct it properly, either

182 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

as speculative counsellors or as active commanders. Let
there be no dissembling the fact that today the servants of
Humanity are ousting the servants of God, root and
branch, from all control of public affairs, as incapable of
really concerning thernselves with such affairs and under-
standing them properly . . . Those who cannot seriously
believe either in God or in mankind are morally unworthy,
so long as their sceptical sickness lasts. As for those who,
on the other hand, claim to combine God and Humanity,
their mental inferiority is at once evident, since they pro-
pose to reconcile two wholly incompatible regimes, and
thereby prove themselves unaware of the true conditions
of either . . .78

Such, then, is the atheism of the religion of Humanity. In
practice it creates the tyranny of a totally socialized society. In
its civiċ and religious functions the individual is wholly bound
over to the great Social Idol. And the Great Being, the Great
Fetish and the Great Environment cooperate to swallow him
up. Can it be said that the menace of the Comtian idol is still
with us today? Pére de Lubac certainly thinks so:

To my mind it is, on the contrary, one of the most dan-
gerous (menaces) that beset us .. . Many of the present
campaigns against individualism already derive their in-
spiration from the ideas of Comte and his disciples, too
often at the cost of the human person... The “accomoda-
tions” and “alliances” favored by Comte have already
borne fruit. They were followed by a period of spontaneous
assimilation, and the faith which used to be a living adher-
ence to the mystery of Christ then came to be no more than
attachment to a social programme, itself twisted and div-
erted from its purpose. Without any apparent crisis, under
a surface which sometimes seemed the reverse of apost-
asy, that faith has slowly been drained of its substance.”°

Although much has changed since Comte wrote his vast syn-
theses, the positivistic mentality is very much alive today ex-
erting enormous influence among scientists and moral
philosophers, not to say sociologists. Scientism, which holds
that to prove something one has to do what is done in natural

28. Auguste.Comte, Lettres Inédites a C. de Bligniéres, pp. 35-36; also quoted
by de: Lubac, S.J., op. cit, p. 149.
29. Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Drama Of Atheist ‘Humanism, pp. 157-158.

Comte: Social Humanity as God 183

science, is quite vigorously alive in this age of science. Though
there is no necessary, inherent transition from research in
science to acceptance of atheism, so many scientists have fol-
lowed that road that to be a scientist has come to mean being
an atheist. Le Dantec, French scientist who died in 1917, is
puzzled by the anomaly of the man of science who is also a man
of faith. In his view, one man is an atheist by virtue of the same
laws by which another is hunchbacked. A deterministic biologi-
cal process determines whatever a man becomes.

But besides living in the age of science and scientism, we are
also living at the apex of the age of relativism. And M. Comte,
with his principle of relativity, has contributed greatly to the
arrival of this age. Under his guidance amor humani generis
displaced amor Dèi. With the divorce of the human from the
divine love, human deformation, not reformation, resulted
from the Comtian messianism. Truth was identified with the
opinions that survived in the harsh, competitive market of
ideas. It reflected what was wanted from reality, not what was
there and offered by reality. Ethics, even among Christians of
all denominations, was identified with what was being done in
reality by the majority, not with what ought to be done by all
rational men. The situation, and men were part of that situa-
tion, created the ethics relevant to the needs of the times. Do
we not have in these two modern situations both a dogmatic
variation on the Comtian principle of relativity as well as a
liturgical refinement of his adoration of the Great Environ-
ment? Moreover, the goals of modern Christians have also be-
come quite Comtian in orientation. Increasing interest and
messianic zeal is focused on creating a better social world in
which the individual tends to be totally absorbed by the collec-
tivity. True, there is a hue and cry for expanded rights, individ-
ual and social, a cry that would be choked off by the supreme
Pontiff of Humanity. But even here the motivation for these
rights is quite Comtian, not Christian. It is Comtian in the sense
that the Christians, indeed often the clergy, that flock to the
banners of expanded rights, are more zealous for the creation
of a humane, secular society than for the coming of the king-

30. F. Le Dantec, L’Athéisme, (Paris: 1906), pp. 9 and following; also quoted
by William A. Luijpen, O.S.A., Phenomenology And Atheism, (Pittsburgh: Du-
quesne University Press, 1964), p. 55.

184 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

dom of Jesus Christ in the hearts of all men. Certainly, the
same zeal could be just.as easily inspired by the Holy Spirit, but
the point is that the social apostles themselves disassociate
themselves from the Gospel, preferring to be inspired by the
spirit of the times, the spirit of sympathy and social instinct for
Humanity.

It seems, then, that it is always the same myopic sickness that
is afflicting the atheistic scientist, moralist and sociologist. The
malady arises from a double illusion. First, the illusion that
transcendence by man to metaphysics, a supernatural religion
and a tri-personal Absolute God is a fantastic, superstitious,
crude enslavement of the whole man and his society. Second,
the illusion that man’s choice to remain below, in the physical
sciences, to discover there that God and the World are one is the
only way of liberating and ennobling the human spirit. Only
the reality of God and the leap of faith to Him can dispel this
double illusion and restore sight to a blinded age. For if the
example of Auguste Comte and his atheism of Humanity
proves anything, it clearly demonstrates that those who refuse
to rise above the adventures of time are condemned to suffer
serfdom under idols of their own fashioning.

Gods as Passions of the Heart

To kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize already on this
earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.

The Myth Of Sisyphus

Albert Camus

To sum up, modern atheism is not a conclusion reached by objective
reasoning, nor is it the result of an examination of reality which in-
cludes new aspects or probes deeper than earlier examinations and
thereby discovers either some new truth or some error in the old rea-
soning. Atheism is to be sought not in the reason but in the will. Athe-
ism springs from the revolt of the man who has written personal
freedom large on his banner. Like Prometheus modern man desires to
shake off the burden of God “and the dream of service to God” to
awaken to conscious possession of himself. He refuses to obey anyone
or bend a knee to anyone, including God, because he insists on being
his own lord and lawgiver.
God on Trial
Georg Siegmund

186 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Heinrich: Ah! Let Him damn me a hundred times, a thousand times,

provided He exists. Goetz, . . . If God doesn’t exist, there is no way of

escaping men. My God, this man blasphemed, I believe in Thee, I

believe. Our Father which art in heaven, I would rather be judged by
an Infinite Being than judged by my equals.

The Devil And The Good Lord

Jean-Paul Sartre

CHAPTER VI

Camus: The God of Absurdity

WITH THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM IN THE TWEN-
tieth century, scarred with two world wars and a continuing
chain reaction of lesser wars and revolutions, the assault
against God has been wrested from the leadership of the sys-
tematizing adventurers. Like Nietzsche before him, but. for
radically opposite reasons, Kierkegaard despised the construc-
tors of logical, utopian, atheistic humanism. Both Nietzsche
and Kierkegaard admitted that the existence of God and His
theophany in Christ and Christianity was the sign of contra-
diction destined for the salvation or bankruptcy of the human
race. In his life and writings Kierkegaard vehemently rejected
the smug complacency and sham sanctity of the secularized
Christianity of his day. He fearlessly, even ruthlessly, returned
to the tragic truths of the Scriptures and he boldly embraced
the harsh sacrifices that are consequent for a life of witnessing
to Christ. Nietzsche, on the other hand, despaired at the sight
of the counterfeit Christianity of his day. He dramatically pro-

188 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

claimed its bankruptcy, the death of its God, the dishonesty of
its morals, the cowardice of its people, the impending extinc-
tion of its structures in the rise and rule of ruthless Superman.
Both of these prophets suffered the lonely livés that are the lot
of moral reformers, for they trenchantly diagnosed the sick-
ness of contemporary man and were angrily rejected by their
unbelieving societies. Alive, they were considered madmen;
dead and revisited through the events of the last sixty years, the
acuteness and veracity of their analyses have established them
as seers of major importance. Neither of these seers suffered
or died for a system of clean, cool concepts. On the contrary,
Nietzsche’s voice in the wilderness of the Enlightenment
called for the replacement of the dead God by the acme of man,
vigorous, adventurous Superman who would hopefully liberate
man from a decadent Christianity and lead him to perfect self-
realization. Whereas Kierkegaard, the melancholy celibate,
fought to liberate the individual person from submergence in
shis own dark tendencies to evil or from flight into the false
security of collectivized systems so as to bring him, through the
daring leap of faith, to full subjecthood in an alliance of love
with the personal, transcendent God of Abraham and Christ.
Moreover, both prophets were consumed at an early age by the
zeal of their missions. At forty-five Nietzsche succumbed in a
psychotic delirium, torn apart by his frenzy for Dionysos and
his rage against Christ. Kierkegaard fell paralyzed in the
streets of Copenhagen after publishing his greatest polemical
blast, The Attack On Christianity, against the soft clergy of
counterfeit Christianity. He died a few weeks later at the age
of forty-two.

In the heyday of the Rationalist Era such systematizers as
Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Comte located the center of
the human personality, and indeed of all society and history, in
human reason and in the science and systems of thought aris-
ing therefrom. This was already a violent break with the Chris-
tian vision of man which grounded the center of human
personality in faith in the person and mission of Jesus Christ
the God-Man whose life, death and resurrection oriented man
towards eternal fulfillment in the bosom of the Divine Tran-
scendence. St. Paul had already gone far beyond Aristotle’s
reason when he announced to the Athenians that faith in

Camus: The God of Absurdity 189

Christ was the true center of man’s personal dignity and des-
tiny. Thus from the moment of her foundation Christianity has
harnessed faith and reason into an harmonious, spiritual force
in quest of transcendent salvation, in hope here, in fulfillment
hereafter. This harmonious adventure of “faith seeking under-
standing” and “understanding seeking faith” established the
thousand years of Medieval Unity as the Age of Faith and the
Age of Reason. Christian Revelation, far from constricting in-
tellectual vision or diminishing human love, opened up infinite
horizons for both by revealing previously unknowable, even
unimaginable, sublime verities that immediately became load-
stones which unleashed in man intense, penetrating, insatiable
intellectual and amatory activity.

Eventually, however, the internal harmony of Christianity
was shattered. The religious revolt of Protestantism rent its
doctrinal, liturgical and jurisdictional unity. The marriage be-
tween faith and reason ended in a divorce sued for by the En-
lightenment. The collaboration between Church and State
collapsed with the French Revolution and the rise of the lai-
cized State. Thus Christian times slowly changed into secular
times. As man’s spiritual center of gravity shifted from faith to
reason, his intellectual focus on transcendent reality became
blurred and his intense delight with the good news of Revela-
tion soured. With his vision now diminished to the limitations
of pure reason’s horizons and his love repressively riveted to
time’s transient realities, man embarked on the adventure of
creating his own encapsulated world-order where he ruled as
his own God. Thus, whereas formerly in the Age of Faith his
love for truth and goodness—natural and divine—ruled su-
preme in his aspirations, now in his Age of Revolt his love for
life—for the plenitude of cultural, progressive, terrestrial life
—gained a thrilling ascendency in his soul. The ideal of liber-
ated, progressive humanity was henceforth set up as his new,
absolute standard for the evaluation of all reality. Under the
scrutiny of this reasonable standard everything, faith in God
and God Himself, were judged. With faith diminished or
lost and love cooled or extinguished, the subject of God
was weighed in this balance and found wanting. It was
perfectly logical, therefore, for the systematizers to deny the
possibility of faith in God, to announce the death of God

190 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

and to erect systems that proved these truths.

When the savants of the Enlightenment dethroned and ban-
ished God from the temple of Christianity, they replaced Him
in the Cathedral of Notre Dame by enthroning the Goddess of
Reason in the person of a celebrated actress-beauty. The Lady
of Reason displaced Our Lady of Faith! Their new speculations
succeeded in shifting man’s major concerns from interest in
God to interest in man, thereby disrupting the nature and des-
tiny of man and the organic society he had created and was
directing Godwards in the Ages of Faith. The concern for man
and his happiness in time naturally enough bore fruit in the
elaboration of a new ethics, the ethics of self-seeking. To be
sure, self-seeking was to be controlled personally by modera-
tion and balanced socially with altruism. But the foundation
for moral integrity had now been radically changed. No longer
was man obliged to be morally good so as to attain his salvation
by adherence to a God-willed natural order of things and,
thereby, to God himself. The radical change now indicated that
man’s most urgent moral obligation was to satisfy his instinc-
tive desire for happiness in such a way as to improve himself,
his fellow men and the human condition.

Based upon this loss of faith in God and the new-found, abso-
lute faith in the ultimate perfection of humanity—to be
achieved solely through the marvelous projects of man himself
—the new morality of the atheists of the eighteenth century
was seen to be mundane, humanitarian and self-serving.

For centuries, then, the world of faith and the world of pure
reason have been contesting for the souls of men. Faith has
been calling men to adhere loyally to absolute truths and eter-
nal moral values—God, His revelation and the Ten Command-
ments. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment, on the
contrary, have been proposing their own set of absolutes as
replacements for those of Christianity—man, his personal hap-
piness and the common progress of humanity. In the cause of
a holy life, Christianity has been encouraging men to worship
God in Christ, to curb their passions and to love and serve their
fellow men in God. In the cause of a happy life, the Enlighten-
ment has been challenging men to worship man, to satisfy their
private passions and to work for social progress in the name of
Humanity. Is it any wonder, then, that the world of God and the

Camus: The God of Absurdity 191

world of the godless have become fatally alienated? Though
co-existing in the same milieu, the men of faith in God and the
men of faith in man are today experiencing the cumulative and
still mounting harshness of centuries of contradiction and
schism over God, Christ and the destiny of man. Each group is
proclaiming in the desert of a “broken world” a contradictory
doctrine and mission for man. The world of believers beckons
men to imitate the ideal of the saint—the man of Christ, who
grows in grace through a life of humility, self-denial and the
sonship of God. The world of atheists, on the other hand, calls
all men to imitate the ideal of the secularist—the man of cul-
ture, who grows in euphoria through a life of civility, self-
indulgence and the cult of his own conscience.

Thus the salient, psychic fact of modern history is man’s
divorce from concrete communion with God, his flight from
religion, his unrooted homelessness in a society that has been
progressively secularized for the past five hundred years.
Disoriented through the rupture of his ties with Church, sacred
symbols, sacraments, religious rites and salvific dogmas, man
has succeeded in despiritualizing nature and losing reverence
for himself and his fellow man. Indeed, secular man has
created an efficient technocratic world and a Humanistic So-
ciety that does not hesitate to use him as a machine, among
many other marvelous machines of his own creation, for the
ambivalent activities of producing a paradise of economic
plenty or unleashing the whirlwind of world wars and the fury
of atomic annihilation.

Does humanity still thrill today with that enthusiastic spirit
of reason and power that moved the Renaissance and Enlight-
enment to liberate mankind from the God-infested structures
of the Middle Ages? Does modern man still enjoy supreme
confidence in the New Science that heralded his complete con-
quest and control of himself and the forces of nature? Has the
secular ethic, as embodied in triumphant capitalism and hu-
manitarian socialism, been able to guarantee mankind perma-
nent economic prosperity? Has the compassionate, democratic,
laicized State been successful in outlawing war and maintain-
ing peace with honor? History is a stubborn, implacable witness
to the hideous truth that rationally secularized, technocratic
society, far from having prevented the encompassing darkness

192 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

of the forces of hate, actually stripped mankind of its spiritual
: defenses and left it naked to the madness of its logical systems.
Such ghastly humanisms as Nazism, Fascism and Commu-
nism, to mention but three modern, man-made social plagues,
are at bottom logical systems and brutal enterprises of human
reason which is vehemently divorced from divine natural real-
ity and arrogantly assured of its supreme self-sufficiency.
When human hubris collapses it brings its whole world
crashing down upon its head. There is no denying that in the
beginning humanistic forms of hubris wonderfully advance
man’s scientific world. They create also prosperous, literate,
well-informed societies. Yet, paradoxically, simultaneous with
such public achievements, humanistic systems of hubris gen-
erate a regression in society toward the total externalization of
life and the depersonalization of the individual. Rational man
then becomes superficial man, incapable of contemplation be-
cause he is poured out on things. Moreover, he is left spiritually
starving for the food of concrete relations and feeling with his
fellow men. Wracked with anxiety over being treated as a num-
ber, a case, a mere abstract shadow of himself, rational man
develops into alienated man. Thus he becomes a stranger to
God, an enemy to nature, a tyrant or slave to the gigantic politi-
co-economic apparatus that he either dominates or serves. The
ultimate desolation is that rational man becomes alienated
even from himself—disoriented, displaced, despairing—iden-
tified no longer as a person but with a function. Caught in a
rational ordering of society that reduced his existence to a void
signifying nothing, modern man expressed a radical revulsion
for such omni-competent constructions in a movement called
“the existentialist revolt.” It is that movement of modern pro-
test against rationalism which we must consider now, a move-
ment that engendered several varieties of existentialist
atheism.

Existentialism And Religious Belief

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was par excellence one of the
greatest revolutionaries against that impersonal, abstract

1. David E. Roberts, Existentialism and Religious Belief (New York: Oxford
University Press, Galaxy Books, 1959).

Camus: The God of Absurdity 193

thinking which was scientifically constructing closed systems
of mental truths. In opposition to these ivory-tower construc- |
tions, Kierkegaard shunned the ritual of systematization in his
reflections as a blight that kills the meaning of truth for daily
existence. Rather he reflected and wrote in answer to personal
anxieties in which he and his fellow men were individually
involved. Philosophy in his work became reflective biography.
He grappled with the vital concerns of individuals from the
inner standpoint of their subjecthood and salvation. In the
arena of human conflict he refused to adopt the attitude of the
spectator-judge who would hand down analyses and verdicts
over moral struggles that were no personal concern of his. On
the contrary, Kierkegaard considers problems as a participator,
confrere and co-sufferer with all individuals in the crises of
immediate experience. He tells us of himself that all his work
revolves around his own tragic experiences. In this sense he is
existentialist to the core and has rightly earned the distinction
of being recognized by all as the founding philosopher of exis-
tentialism. For as a passionately personal thinker who was
constantly reflecting on his own experiences, he spoke up most
convincingly for the intuitive, instinctive, mysterious in the
spiritual itinerary of individuals. His great concern was always
the individual’s personal encounter with Christ. The agonizing
choice for every man is, “Will I say Yes or No to God?” Again
his own life demonstrates his answer to this challenge. Brought
up by a father who was deeply religious but afflicted by
the torment of guilt over the heinous crimes of blasphemy
and adultery, it was not surprising that as a youth Kierke-
gaard revolted against his family and for a time even aban-
doned Christianity for the easy, cynical, dissolute life of the
average student. This driftless existence led him to the valley
of despair and he even contemplated committing suicide. How-
ever, in 1836 he experienced a moral conversion which was
completed two years later by a religious return to Christ and
Christianity.

Thus Kierkegaard’s existentialist thinking began with con-
cern for Christian realities and proceeded to its commitment
through the study of the existential personages in Sacred Scrip-
ture. In all his works he treats and analyzes the personal en-
counter of individuals with God, Christ and Christianity and

194 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

their mutual relationships of reconciliation or rejection conse-
quent to freely made decisions. Being, thus, a personal thinker
interested in the unique subject who must respond in crisis and
anxiety to the call of God, Kierkegaard despised the standoffish-
ness of the abstract creators of systems. “It is intelligence,” he
wrote in his Journals, “it is intelligence and nothing else that
had to be opposed.” A great intelligence himself, who ‘rever-
enced this creative power of man, Kierkegaard, nevertheless,
set out not to degrade intelligence but to expose and curb its
arrogant attempts to explode the “myth of God” and thereby
divinize rational humanity in His place. He saw his mission as
one of delivering man from the arid imperialism of the intel-
lect. That was the negative side of his calling. On the positive
side, he aimed at restoring man to the inner depths of his per-
sonal life, however painful that process would be. Regarding
himself as a Christian Socrates, Kierkegaard deliberately be-
came a gadfly to abstract, romantic, complacent Christianity,
prodding it away from its easy life and convenient conscience
toward the crisis of making a choice for the cross of Christ. To
live in the truth, under the eye of God, with a self-commitment
ventured in the dreadful leap of faith into the presence of God,
such witnessing constituted the test and triumph of choosing
one’s real self, of achieving one’s real existence.

Since the contemporary existentialist revolt began as a
frankly Christian movement, it follows that this important
mood of thinking cannot be equated, as is often erroneously
done, with Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of atheistic existentialism.
The fact is that Sartre himself admits that there are at least
“two types of existentialists: a first group who are Christians
and among whom I number Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel;
and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among
whom I number Heidegger and myself.” Sartre himself is on
the average twenty years younger than the authors he men-
tioned and he had published nothing at all when Gabriel Marcel
had already developed the broad outlines of his Christian, exis-
tential philosophy. Troisfontaines, explaining the more posi-
tive view of the revolt, writes: “We shall be able to define
the existentialist movement as a philosophy of subjectivity, of
selfhood, whose fundamental doctrine proclaims man’s free-

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen &
Co., Ltd., 1966), p. 26.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 195

dom in the accomplishment of his destiny, and whose principal
method is consequently that of description or phenomenol]-
ogy.” What the Christian and atheistic existentialists have in
common is that they all agree on the supreme importance of
the individual subject. They affirm that on his individual use of
freedom will depend the sort of man each person will become,
for each person is in the hands of his own counsel and an-
guished at the responsibility for himself that is solely his.
Where the two forms of existentialism differ radically is in the
total opposition of the atheistic form to the Scriptural interpre-
tation of man and his destiny given by Christian existentialism.
Atheistic existentialists like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty pervert
and secularize the religious themes explored by Christian exis-
tentialists. Before mentioning some of the major themes
analyzed by all forms of existentialism, it is well to recall that
all contemporary existentialists are phenomenologists, that is,
they render explicit, by means of concrete description in depth,
what is usually only implicit in the experiences of our daily
lives. Most men usually live on the surface of their experiences.
Phenomenologists, as skilled observers, analyzers, thinkers
and writers, progressively and vividly lead men into the unsus-
pected richness of their daily experiences.

To contrast further the theistic from the atheistic emphases
among the various representatives of these two principal
camps, it may be helpful to enunciate some of the themes that
have preoccupied these philosophers, for they reveal the burn-
ing issues in the radical struggle between Christianity and con-
temporary atheism. Here we shall merely enumerate the
special themes of three Christian—Kierkegaard, Jaspers and
Marcel—and three atheistic—Camus, Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty—existentialist thinkers. Needless to say, since this work
is an essay on the theological adventures of some contempo-
rary atheists, we shall give below a fuller exposition only of the
thought of the atheistic thinkers mentioned. In addition to the
thought of these three thinkers, we shall investigate the exis-
tentialism of Heidegger who, though he objects to this classifi-
cation, is usually identified and analyzed as an atheistic
existentialist.

Among the Christian existentialists, then, the special themes

3. Roger Troisfontaines, S.J., “What is Existentialism?” Thought, Fordham
University Quarterly, Vol. XXXII, No. 127, Winter, 1957-1958, p. 516.

196 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

of Kierkegaard’s work may be extremely summarized and sim-
plified in two formulas. First, the only decisive marks of an
authentically Christian existence are despair and dread. Sec-
ond, that which alone is capable of raising a human life from
the despair of the aesthetic through the reform of the moral to
the fulfillment of the authentically Christian existence is the
acceptance through faith of the absurdity of God’s revelation.
St. Paul accepted it when he testified that Christ crucified was
a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.
The spirit of this truth is caught in Tertullian’s cry of faith:
“Credo quia absurdum!” (“I believe because it is foolish!”)

Jaspers developed his existential thinking around the follow-
ing human experiences. The free choice of ideals and a destiny
mold the human I of each individual. But these ideals and hopes
are doomed to shipwreck in the world of tragic events. Never-
theless, each disaster ought to be deciphered as one of those
“limiting situations” that foreshadows my death which is the
ultimate seal of my finitude and contingency. Instead of suc-
cumbing to despair within this tragic milieu, each individual
should accept his lot with a philosophical and religious faith
that reveals such events as accurate signs indicating the only
road to the Transcendence of God, who always remains when
all else fails.

Marcel, a personal thinker par excellence, reflects on such of
his experiences as can be shared by anyone—fidelity, hope, love
—and arrives at the following concrete conclusions: A person's
authentic human existence is determined by the use he makes
of his freedom. The dreadful decision no one can escape is
whether to say Yes or No to God, the Supreme Personal Exis-
tence and Absolute Thou in whom every creature finds its
meaning. But all personal existences, whether divine or hu-
man, are mysteries in the sense that they transcend or escape
every intellectual attempt to solve them as problems and are
inexhaustibly open only to affective contemplation and com-
munion. The fulfillment and plenitude of personal existence is
achieved, therefore, only in the eager decision to live with God.

The atheistic existentialist thinkers, despite their differ-
ences, are in agreement on some very important issues. They
agree with Nietzsche that “God is dead,” certainly for them-
selves. And they mean the God of Judaeo-Christian revelation.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 197

For them all revelation has been proven by science, reason and
experience to be a fairy tale. They agree also that the Christian
moral code is as dead as its Christian God. Thus they proclaim
in a triumphant manner the logical conclusion of Dostoevsky’s
character. “If God is nothing, everything is permitted.” But
even more, theirs is also the gloomy finding that, with God
defunct, everything is a matter of absurdity, futility and an-
nihilation. Each expresses these conclusions in his own way
and from his own experiences.

Camus, gifted novelist and dramatist, holds that the world is
bereft of any reasonable significance. Man’s experience of the
universal absurdity of existence arises from the confrontation
of his own appeal for clarity and charity to a world that re-
sponds with irrational, cruel silence. The inhumanity, indiffer-
ence, cruelty of nature and man’s own tragic temporality,
always mercilessly terminated by death, make the belief in a
good God nothing more than a wishful thinking, an escape into
superstition. The real world is in itself Godless, valueless. To
give life meaning, man must revolt against the absurd, reject
the escapism of suicide and faith, and become, as it were, an
atheist saint by an active life of self-commitment to the auda-
cious exercise of freedom and pride in their fullest degree.
Personal and social greatness is achieved only by self-commit-
ment to the revolt against the absurd and one’s dire destiny.

Sartre is not so much a man for whom “God is dead,” as one
for whom “God is impossible.” For he argues that the very idea
of God is self-contradictory. His fundamental premise is the
affirmation of pure phenomenon as the sole existent. There
exists no other real existence than the phenomenon of exis-
tence itself. Once the relationship of the phenomena of con-
sciousness and the world is clarified, philosophy has fulfilled its
function. An Absolute Being called God, that would include and
transcend both consciousness and the world, simply cannot ex-
ist. For phenomena, as they manifest themselves, reveal no
ultimate foundation or transcendent origin for their exist-
ences; they simply are there in an absurd and superfluous man-
ner. It follows that man alone gives meaning to things and
creates all values—aesthetic, moral, political, economic, social
and personal—in every phase of his existence. He does this by
the courageous exercise of his individual and unlimited free-

198 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

dom. His greatness lies in his decision to live freely for a cause
of his own choosing, in his ejection of the temptation to bad
faith which consists in a flight from the responsible exercise of
his freedom into the security of uncommitted conformity.

Merleau-Ponty discovers the wonderment and authenticity
of human existence in the freedom and contingency of man the
subject. Truth, values and their eternal development arise
from the dialogue between man and the world. There is no God
because if there were an Absolute, Necessary Being, He would
necessarily exhaust the indefinability of man, destroy man’s
free subjecthood and, as Truth Himself, render futile man’s
thrilling quest for truth. Man, himself “a weakness” at the
heart of the thing-like beings of nature, is nevertheless the
center where all cosmological events find their meaning and
become history. Though living in the dizziness of contingency,
man must not retreat from himself or refuse to choose this very
contingency within the world. Flights to religion, especially to
Catholic Christianity, or to humanisms like contemporary
communism are retreats from contingency into occultism.
They are acts of treason by man against being man and aban-
donments of his search for truth and values. À

This brief presentation of some existentialist positions indi-
cates the opposite directions taken by various philosophers of
our times. Their main differences are arrived at by the same
concrete process. Each writer analyzes his own experiences,
which are often radically different from, even contradictory to,
those of the others. Their varied, indeed unique, visions express
the disagreements which send them off on distinct, irreconcila-
ble, humanistic missions. It will be wise to recall this truth as
we explore now four contemporary varieties of existentialist,
atheistic humanism.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) Atheism of Absurdity

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, November 7,
1913, of Breton and Spanish parentage. He was raised in North
Africa by his Spanish mother under dire circumstances, for his
father was killed when Camus was only a year old. Education
was expensive and hence difficult for Camus to pursue. He had
to hold many jobs, therefore—one of them was playing goalie

Camus: The God of Absurdity 199

for the Algiers football team—and, by winning scholarships as
well, was able to achieve the master’s degree in philosophy at
the University of Algiers. Shortly thereafter he arrived in Met-
ropolitan France to work as a journalist. He was active in the
Resistance Movement during the German occupation of
France, where he edited the clandestine paper Combat. He
very early gave signs of genius as a writer, when his skillful
newspaper exposé of the abominable ghetto conditions among
certain groups of Algerian natives provoked rabid reactions
but, nevertheless, moved the French government to remedy the
social scandal. Before the war he had written a play, Caligula
(1939), and during the war, but prior to his self-commitment to
the Resistance, two books which made him instantly famous:
his first major philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and
his first novel, Tke Stranger, both in 1942. In 1951 The Rebel, his
second major philosophical work, appeared and at once his
break with Sartre began. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature, the youngest man (at forty-three) to re-
ceive the award since Rudyard Kipling was chosen in 1907 at
forty-two. In the final year of his life Camus compiled twenty-
three essays, lectures and interviews which he felt represented
his maturer thought and which he wanted preserved in Eng-
lish. This collection, constituting his third major philosophical
work, was published posthumously in 1961 under the title Resis-
tance; Rebellion; Death. A novel, The First Man, was in pro-
cess when Camus came to his untimely end at the height of his
genius in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.4 The
tragedy is emphasized by the thought he had written as re-
cently as 1958, in the preface to a new edition of L’Envers et
QVendroit: “I continue to be convinced that my work hasn’t even
been begun.”

Camus, like Kierkegaard, is the very antithesis of a philoso-
pher system-builder. His philosophy is grounded in his own
psychological concerns arising from his experiences and his
reflections on the meaning of these for the whole of mankind.
Thus all his works—plays, novels, theses, short stories, essays
and interviews—are far more self-confession than artistic
fiction, though they are, fortunately for the reader, these as

4. David E. Denton, The Philosophy of Albert Camus (Boston: Prime Publish-
ers, 1967).

200 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

well. Early in his career when he was writing his plays
Caligula and Cross Purpose (Le Malentendu), Camus was
deeply shaken by the experience of what he called “the ab-
surd.” In Cross Purpose he puts into the mouth of the mother,
who with her daughter kills a boarder staying at their inn for
his money, only to find to their horror after the deed that the
mother committed filicide and the daughter fratricide, these
words: “But then this world we live in doesn’t make sense, and
Ihave a right to judge it, since I’ve tested all it has to offer, from
creation to destruction.” In this drama Martha, the daughter,
is the atheist in bitter rebellion against her harsh lot of poverty,
hard, menial work, spinsterhood at a young age in a country
where the sun never shines but where rain, fog and dampness
shrivel the soul. And now she and her mother are rich, free to
live in the islands of sunshine and happiness about which they
dreamed so long and ardently! But the unspeakable truth has
destroyed in them now the capacity for happiness and freedom.
The mother moves on to suicide. Martha rants against heaven:
“I hate this narrow world in which we are reduced to gazing up
to God”? But ranting against a non-listener is sheer futility. She
must vent her spleen where she can find some satisfaction, on
a human listener. Poor Maria, wife of the murdered Jan,
becomes that shocked listener when she calls for her husband
and receives the news of the tragedy that has struck his
playacting, homecoming surprise. In a calloused report of the
crime that deliberately rises to a crescendo of cruel hatred,
Martha, herself now determined on suicide, attempts to destroy
the faith of Maria.

We did to your husband last night what we had done to
other travellers before; we killed him and took his money
... If you must know, there was a misunderstanding. And
if you have any experience at all of the world, that won’t
surprise you. (Jan was not recognized on his return home
after a twenty year absence.) ... Your tears revolt me
... But fix this in your mind; neither for him nor for us,
neither in life nor in death, is there any peace or home-
land. For you’ll agree one can hardly call it a home, that
place of clotted darkness underground, to which we go
5. Albert Camus, Cross Purpose (Le Malentendu), translated by Stuart Gil-

bert (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1965), p. 145.
6. Ibid. p. 148.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 201

from here, to feed blind animals . . . We’re cheated, I tell
you. Cheated! What do they serve, those blind impulses
that surge up in us, the yearnings that rack our souls? Why
cry out for the sea, or for love? What futility! Your husband
knows now what the answer is: that charnel house where
in the end we shall lie huddled together, side by side... try
to realize that no grief of yours can ever equal the injustice
done to man.

And now—before I go, let me give a word of advice. I owe
it to you, since I killed your husband. Pray your God to
harden you to stone. It’s the happiness He has assigned
Himself, and the one true happiness. Do as He does, be
deaf to all appeals, and turn your heart to stone while
there still is time. But if you feel you lack the courage to
enter into this blind, hard peace—then come and join us in
our common house. Good-bye, my sister. As you see, it’s all
quite simple. You have a choice between the mindless hap-
piness of'stones and the slimy bed in which we are await-
ing you.’

The Myth of Sisyphus abounds in evidences of the absurd. Its
thesis is that the feeling of the absurd arises from the daily
confrontations between man and his world. The consciousness
of the overpowering hostility and indifference of nature, of the
fickle temporality of human life, of its inevitable cancellation
by death, of the deadening monotony of a technocratic routine,
of the unattainable otherness of people or even of our very
selves, of the arbitrary and protracted sufferings of innocent
children, all these evidences of despotic capriciousness and
many, many more prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the
world is irrational and that man, wandering around as a
stranger in this wilderness of inhumanity is on a path that
leads to nothing, to death. In the face of such an endlessly
accumulating litany of afflictions, human reason, by instinct
questing for purpose, justice and happiness, stands stunned,
utterly frustrated and confounded. Desperate in his hunger for
clarity and charity from the world and his fellow men, man
becomes angered by their indifference to his aspirations and
takes refuge in hedonism or instinctualism or stoicism. How
else escape from the heartless silence that confronts his exas-
perated “Why?”

Other existentialist thinkers, each in his own way, have tried

7. Ibid. pp. 151-156.

202 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to escape this unbearably absurd exasperation. Camus exam-
ines three spiritual sorties and rejects them as illusions not
solutions. Kierkegaard embraced the absurd by leaping beyond
reason, beyond the “indescribable universe where contra-
diction, antinomy, anguish or impotence reigns,” to the affir-
mation of God in faith. Jaspers’s leap to the Transcendent
springs from his faith in the acceptance of tragic experience as
the only path to meaning. Chestov too leaps in faith beyond
reason, from the absurd in reality to an absurd God. What intel-
lectual suicides! All three of these thinkers “deify what crushes
them.” In reality, they do not transcend but transform the ab-
surd. The absurd is God! “His greatness is his incoherence. His
proof is his inhumanity.”*® Against these attempts to escape
reason Camus protests that in reality there is nothing beyond
reason. The absurd world is de facto godless; within it there
exist no absolute values.

Moreover, there is no other world for man to inhabit. And
Camus would have men with “the courage to be” directing this
world’s formation. Yet, he is profoundly aware that the utterly
absurd poses its own total solution, the abandonment of life’s
tension in the act of suicide. Camus unequivocally rejects sui-
cide as the solution to the feeling of absurdity. Suicide is sur-
render to absurdity; that alone, not any moral considerations,
renders it objectionable. Killing oneself amounts to confessing
that life is unbearable, suffering useless, commitment not
worth the trouble. In reality, recognizing the absurdity of life
is not the end but only the beginning of its spiritual adventure.
The way to conquer the absurd is to give it meaning. The way
to give it meaning is to refuse to submit oneself to it. The
way to stand free of the absurd, and thereby give it meaning,
is to rebel against it. True, the absurd ceases in suicide but
so does man and the greatness of his drama. What is this
but an irrecoverable loss of freedom, an absolute negation
of reason? f

Sisyphus is the most inspiring hero, who demonstrates how
to make the absurd live. He embraced the absurd tragically yet
triumphantly. Condemned by the irate gods to push a huge rock
eternally to the summit of a steep slope, only to watch it eter-
nally rush down to the plain again, Sisyphus conquers the ab-

8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien (New
York: Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 25-26.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 203

surd by consciously revolting against it. He despises the solu-
tion of suicide or the submission of faith; he becomes stronger
than the rock, superior to his fate through the defiant scorn he
hurls at the gods. His greatness is achieved in his revolt, in the
unequaled human pride that spurns divine consolations or
hopes. His enlightened reason and absolute will pulverize the
gods and reduce their world to ridicule. As for man’s world,
Camus has Caligula testify against it:

Really this world of ours, the scheme of things as they call
it, is quite intolerable. That’s why I want the moon, or
happiness, or eternal life—something, in fact, that may
sound crazy, but which isn’t this world.®

. This world has no importance; once a man realizes that,
he wins his freedom... There’s nothing in this world made
to my stature. And yet I know... that all I need is for the
impossible to be. The impossible!’

Now what manner of life may a man of the absurd live in the
face of the impossible? Clearly, in a meaningless universe
moral obligations are non-existent and all is permitted. But,
Camus tells us, “All is permitted does not signify that nothing
is forbidden.”!! Absurdity and impossibility simply render all
consequences of human activity morally indifferent. Thus,
crime is forbidden not because it is immoral but because it is
childish and stupid. The experience of duty is as morally indif-
ferent and legitimate as any other experience. All human ac-
tions, being free and morally indifferent, have no qualitative
but merely quantitative differences. Thus, man can live with
“divine irresponsibility,” there being no God to answer to. Of
course, one is free to live virtuously through caprice.

In his novel The Stranger Camus created the hero of quan-
titative morality. Meursault is, in the words of Sartre, “one of
those terrible innocents who shock society by not accepting the
rules of its game.”!? In all his experiences Meursault acts like
an innocent, amoral, human animal. Whether he is at work,
swimming in the nude, at his mother’s funeral, attending a

9, Albert Camus, Caligula, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1965), p. 34.

10. Ibid., p. 34 and p. 97.

11. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 50.

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier
Books, 1962), p. 30.

204 THE GODS OF ATHEISM.

comedy in the theater, in the arms of his mistress, killing an
Arab or experiencing boredom while confessing an atheism of
unconcern to the judge, each experience is as morally valueless
as the other for Meursault. What Camus is demonstrating in
Meursault is his own conviction that it is impossible to justify
moral values through reasoning. The absurd man or the Chris-
tian saint? It is a matter of quantity versus quality; the saint
chooses human actions of quality. He accepts responsibility,
the realities of sin, guilt, remorse, punishment as well as their
opposites—virtue, peace, reward. On the other hand, though
the absurd binds and demands responsibility, it admits of no
sin, no guilt, no remorse. There is only amoral experience; peo-
ple can learn from past experience so as to live more fully in
the future. Thus, the Don Juan who fulfills himself to capacity
in the realization of his experiences even though he knows
these experiences have no ultimate meaning; the soldier who
fights for a cause even though he knows it is doomed to failure
in the desert of history; the artist who creates to capacity even
though he foresees himself and his work doomed to extinction,
these are all examples of heroic men of the absurd who live in
the lucid awareness of absurdity, who make life worth living by
turning its lost causes, after the example of Sisyphus, into con-
quests of revolt and personal sacrifice in the very teeth of a
nihilistic future. Thus Camus would save man from the pessi-
mism of suicide through a three-fold ethical spirit. First, scorn
for the gods which will preserve the man of the absurd from
philosophical suicide. Second, pride of revolt which will pre-
serve the man of the absurd from physical suicide. Third, the
passion for happiness which will lead the man of the absurd to
become the master of his own fate, the conqueror of gods and
tyrants. All three—scorn, the resolve to revolt, the passion for
optimism—enable the man of the absurd to go beyond the nihil-
ism of suicide to the summit of self-commitment to human
greatness.

Knowledge in the Face of Absurdity

Camus admits the possibility of limited knowledge, but he
denies the possibility of any knowledge of anything beyond the
human condition. Man knows only what he can touch, what
offers resistance. Beyond the human condition nothing exists.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 205

Hence knowledge of an Absolute that transcends the human
condition is meaningless. Camus represents man’s progressive
advance in his process of knowing by the three phases of sensa-
tionism, perception and construction.

Sensationism represents all knowledge as the fruit of sensory
experiences. This is tentative, relative knowledge, subject to
the manipulations of consciousness and leading to few general-
izations and even fewer conclusions. But from this base of
sense experience do the phases of perception and construction
proceed. Now the sensationist character par excellence is
represented by Meursault in Camus’s novel The Stranger. The
reader, as he follows the story which is narrated in the first
person by Meursault himself, sees the colors of the ocean, sky,
sand; feels the hot sun of Algeria invade his body; thrills to a
swim in the blue, smooth ocean that cools his whole being.
Meursault, amazingly observant of objects, people, nature
which he captures in vivid detail, narrates all in bright, short
sentences. The very crime committed by Meursault is a crime
of sensation. It flows from no motive of envy, hatred, greed nor
revenge. Meursault fires a gun five times into an Arab because
the cumulative, crescendoing sensations of consuming heat
caused by the blazing sun, scorching sands and withering winds
compelled some reaction of relief, if he were not to go stark
mad. Nothing so abstract as love or hate pulled the trigger.

When he treats of the phase of perception in man’s knowl-
edge, Camus makes the following observations. Abstractions,
as such, are always non-verifiable, hence they are non-objects,
non-knowledge. Man’s knowledge is contained within the ab-
surd limits of things capable of being perceived. Now percep-
tion simply records things passively. Meursault again is the
acme of the humanly animated movie film. He records every-
thing; each flash upon the imagination of the reader is a short,
descriptive event that simply unfolds. But Meursault explains,
synthesizes nothing. Sartre says of Camus’s view on perception
that “the universe of the absurd man is the analytic world of
the neo-realist.”!3

Obviously, Camus knows that man is an incurable explainer
of his experiences. And when his explanatory efforts attain the
expertise of the philosopher so that he creates categories, laws,
systems of ordered being, his end product is not true knowledge,

13. Ibid., p. 40.

206 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

but simply artificial construction raised on the foundations of
sense knowledge and perception. Though denying they are true
knowledge, Camus has no objections against mental construc-
tions as such. What he despises is the substitution of these
ghosts of reality for concrete reality and, far more, their indi-
vidual constructors themselves. For history records that con-
structors of abstract reality who attempted to impose their
mental creations as substitutes for the vital world of reality
have developed into the most murderous tyrants of humanity.
Take for example know-it-all Marxism which explains history
dogmatically from beginning to end, insists it knows the out-
come of the future now and justifies its slaughter of today’s
man for the sake of tomorrow’s classless creature. Its Garden
of Eden remains in time but is placed at the end.“ In that
position it can seduce more men to Marxism. According to
Camus the Christians are as condemnable as the Marxists for
they too claim to know for certain the ends of history which
they, unlike the Marxists, place beyond time in an eternal para-
dise or hell. God and eternity make time meaningful, bearable
for them; they subordinate and transmute the absurd to the
Absolute. More recently a liberal humanism, such as the ab-
straction of Man-himself, has been afflicting human beings. It
has substituted the human for the divine absolute, the one no
more verifiable than the other. Liberal Humanism is but Chris-
tianity in the last stages of its development; it is the religion of
Humanity. Just as Christianity divorced men from themselves
for an abstract God, so liberal humanism divorces individuals
from themselves for an abstract humanity. All of these faith
systems are based on the arrogant presumption of a certain
knowledge of what is beyond the human condition and what
the future must inevitably be. They have perpetrated mass
murders, cruel displacements of millions from their homes and
even now continue a progressive pulverization of the human
individual, always, to be sure, in the name of an abstract jus-
tice, truth, freedom and salvation. The price for the realization
of their bloodless phantoms is the shedding of the real blood of
unnumbered millions of individuals.

The frustrating fact is that man lives in an unreasonable
world with a power for knowledge which is absurdly restricted
to sense findings. He will be forever, therefore, a stranger to

14. David E. Denton, op. cit., p. 38.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 207

himself and the world, for he will never be able to comprehend
the total range of either. Camus has man involved, then, in an
absurd world, with absurd limits to his knowledge, on a mission
doomed to long-range failure—despite its short-range accom-
plishments—to get beyond the nihilism of absurdity through
the practice of a morality of rebellion against the absurd. Per-
haps a further look should be taken at his ethics of rebellion.

In his second major philosophical work, The Rebel, Camus
shows that he was tired of the nihilism and negativism of his
earlier work. He seeks a way out of his nihilism through a more
positive affirmation of man’s ideals and possibilities, Rebellion
is the answer to nihilism. In his ethic of rebellion Camus syn-
thesized three cultural currents of the Christian West: the pas-
sionate commitment of the Hebrew to moral rectitude in a
world to be saved; the noble attempt of the Greek to establish
reason, balance and beauty as rulers in a world to be loved; the
humane efforts of the Existentialist to liberate the unique indi-
vidual from the tyranny of abstraction and restore him to his
sublime, frequently irrational, subjecthood in a world to be
transformed through the solidarity of all men.

It will be noticed that Camus rejected the religious elements
of all three cultural currents. God, temporal messianism, salva-
tion and damnation are ruled out as childish plunges into irra-
tionality. Secular counterparts, too, that strive to replace
religious utopias with humanistic utopias are also ruled out as
deifications of history that dehumanize man. Over two hundred
pages of the work are dedicated to rejecting the metaphysical
rebellion of artists and writers and the historical rebellion of
the politicians. They deny the world, degrade man and resort to
murder to change both.

What then is the nature of Camus’s rebellion and how is it to
be contained so as to prevent it from escalating endlessly until
it has obliterated human society? Camus’s ethic of rebellion
demands a rebellion against extremes; it stresses the Greek
notion of moderation, a reaction toward the middle. Reason-
able limits are set to rebellion, so history, science, logic and
morality demonstrate, by the common human nature of man
which naturally shuns extremes and gravitates toward the
golden mean. Camus appeals here to the Mediterranean tradi-
tion for humane moderation as against the “Nordic Dreams” of
intemperance. In his critique of this explanation, Cruickshank

208 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

writes: “This idea of rebellion is obviously both non-Christian
and non-Marxist. It emphasizes nature rather than history,
moderation rather than extremism, human concern rather
than abstract ideology, the dialogue rather than the directive
... It is no doubt obvious that the guide in Camus, as distinct
from the spokesman, is vague about details and sometimes has
recourse to a lyrical, personal language that uses such terms as
pensée solaire and espirit méditerranéen.”

Camus and the Atheism of Resentment

Camus seems to be a thorough atheist. But he did not develop
any technical, a priori, intellectual framework to sustain his
atheism. On the other hand, however, he was obsessed with
concern for the religious aspects of man’s life. All his works
treat quite seriously such topics as God, the meaning of life, sin,
guilt, innocence, suffering, death and how to face the future. He
wrote hostile criticisms about organized religion, especially
against Christianity. What then were the causes and aspects of
Camus’ atheism?

Perhaps Meursault, in The Stranger, epitomizes the content
and spirit of Camus’s atheism. Meursault, the atheist, living an
apparently monotonous life bereft of any project or hope, ex-
periences, nevertheless, happiness. He is condemned to death
by the judge and the people, not because he murdered an Arab,
which he openly admits, but because he is a total stranger to
any hierarchy of absolute moral values, a stranger, therefore,
also to the legalistic society in which he lives. Yet in defiance
of this verdict, Meursault attains a sort of peace in the very end.
On the verge of being beheaded, he has discovered “for the first
time the tender indifference of the world.” He gives himself up
fully to that indifference. As he realizes that this experience of
indifference has such a remarkable, fraternal affinity for his
free spirit, Meursault can exclaim: “I feel that I have been
happy and that I am so even at this instant.” Meursault has
discovered happiness in and through the absurd indifference of
the world and of his fellowmen. He has fallen in love with the
absurd. Thus, when the chaplain visits him to plead the cause
of God and the salvation of his soul, Meursault defiantly cries

15. John Cruickshank, Introduction to Albert Camus, Caligula and Cross
Purpose, (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1965), pp. 18-19.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 209

out: “All your certitudes are not as precious as a single hair of
a woman.” What Meursault loves is concrete, sensuous reality
—the sun, ocean, sky, light, heat; living bodies, his own, those
of his fellow men, but above all, the body of woman and he loves
all this despite its indifferent harshness to man. As for God and
kindred abstractions, he despises “ideas” over which men mur-
der men.

Camus is Nietzschean in his rebellion against the sterile ab-
stractions of the professors. Indeed, he proudly admits his
spiritual descent from this philosopher who mocked faith in
God as a mental malady. Though tinged with rationalism to the
degree that he refused to seek truth beyond what appealed to
his reason, Camus’s unbelief is really nourished from another
source, the experience of absurdity in daily life. Rationalism
disposed him from atheism; resentment against the absurd
moved him to embrace total unbelief.

One day when he was a boy of sixteen, Camus went for a walk
with his friend Max Pol Fouchet. It was a beautiful day. In a
short time, their attention was drawn by a crowd that gathered
on the road ahead. On arrival at the crowd, they saw in their
midst the body of a small Arab boy just crushed to death by a
bus. The poor mother was sobbing out her despair; the father
stood shocked in silence. Helpless, Camus and his friend
started to move on. Then turning abruptly, Camus pointed first
to the crowd and then to the blue sky: “You see,” he said,
“heaven is silent.’!¢

This experience was crucial for Camus. His vivacious, deli-
cate sensitivity was shocked by the sensuous experience of
death which moved brutally, absurdly at the heart of life. He
never got over this experience; the tragic event colored his
entire view of the world; it left him dazed, wounded forever. He
transformed this wound into his cure. One is reminded of Ivan
Karamazov who rejected a world where a single child would be
made to weep. Such a small life snuffed out by a stupid acci-
dent. One is also reminded of the child of Othon, the judge in
Camus’s story, The Plague. The child suffers horribly in the
presence of Dr. Rieux and Fr. Paneloux before succumbing to
the absurd bubonic plague. Dr. Rieux, unable to comprehend an

16. Charles Moeller, “Aspects de l’athéisme dans la littérature contem-
poraine,” in L'Athéisme Daus La Vie Et La Culture Contemporaine (Paris:
Desclée & Cie, 1968), Tome I, Vol. 2., p. 127.

210 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

abstract God who wills the death of children, complains to the
priest: “That little child, you know this very well, was inno-
cent.” How then could it have been punished for its sins, as the
priest had preached? Fr. Paneloux protests that “this sort of
thing is revolting because it surpasses our understanding. But
perhaps we should love what we cannot understand?”!” Dr.
Rieux remains adamant in his rebellion against a conception of
love that decrees the agony of children.

Camus’s atheism, according to Moeller, is a Gordion knot
twisted together by the strands of ignorance and resentment.
Camus never really belonged to any religion. His grandmother,
of course, insisted on his making his First Communion for the
purpose of preventing difficulties later on in life. He was in-
structed for a few days in a superficial way by one of the neigh-
boring vicars. “I do not begin with the princple that the truth
of Christianity is illusory,” Camus said in 1949. “I just never
joined Christianity, that’s all.” Moreover, he never found an
answer in Christianity for the harsh poverty in which he was
raised. To make matters worse, religion was hopelessly mixed
up with politics and Camus detested this alliance. He especially
hated the triumph of the Church in the Spanish Civil War
where Nazi and Fascist forces were aiding the Franco side. The
political regime established by Franco was to be a block be-
tween Camus and any effort to comprehend religion. But the
shock of the Hungarian revolution and slaughter made him
revolt against Communism and understand better what Spain
had to purge itself of. Yet his experiences as a journalist led
him to the conviction that religion was one form of myth about
the Absolute in whose name men oppressed their fellowmen. It
was this suspicion of duplicity and hypocrisy that led Camus to
say in a conference to Christians in 1949:

In reality what is the world looking forward to? This
world, 80 percent of which lives outside of grace, is face to
face with the problem of evil. My generation has lived in
the revolution. They have uncovered unutterable hypoc-
risy in morality. They have witnessed the murderer jus-
tified, torture accepted as mere disability. The floors of the
Gestapo premises on Rue Pompe would reverberate with
the cries of the tormented, but the brave porter who

17. Albert Camus, Tke Plague, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967), p. 178.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 211

cleaned the rooms declared: “I’m not concerned with what
my tenants are doing...” It is time to shatter this con-
spiracy of silence.

Nevertheless, Camus paradoxically rejected the idea of sin.
Or if there is sin in life, it cannot be despair of this life so much
as hope in another life. Hope is perhaps the greatest evil for
humanity. For such hope reduces man to the sterile attitude of
resignation. But to live courageously means never to be re-
signed to reality as it is. Even so, despite this rejection of sin
and guilt, Camus, in his story Tke Fall, demonstrates that the
atheist does suffer from an inner compulsion to confess his
guilt, especially when this guilt arises from dereliction in one’s
social responsibilities. The novel is a monologue of a formerly
respected Parisian lawyer, now an atheist habitué of the Am-
sterdam waterfront, who confesses his life to stranger after
stranger while drinking liberal quantities of gin at one of the
shady harbor alehouses. What disintegrated his former state of
self-satisfied harmony with himself and high-society life in
Paris was his failure to come to the rescue of a young woman
who one night in his presence jumped into the Seine from the
Pont Royal and drowned. He had listened to the drowning
woman’s cries going downstream until they died away, frozen
in fear, without moving a muscle to help her. His atheism was
social not intellectual, springing from the social, learned cir-
cles in Paris where God was out of fashion. But the famous
criminal lawyer, reflecting with his friends at the bar, analyzes
this spirit of atheism with deep insight.

The word “God” has lost its meaning; it’s not worth the risk
of shocking anyone by using it.

Take our moral philosophers, for instance, with their
moral seriousness, loving their neighbors and all the rest
—nothing distinguishes them from Christians except they
don’t preach in churches. What, in your opinion, keeps
them from becoming converted? Human respect, perhaps,
respect for men; yes, human respect. They don’t want to
start a scandal, so they keep their feelings to themselves.
I knew an atheist novelist, for example, who used to say
his prayers every night. That didn’t alter anything. How he
gave it to God in his books? What a dressing down, as one
might say. A militant freethinker to whom I spoke of this

18. Vie Intellectuelle, April 1949, pp. 337-338.

212 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

raised his hands—with no evil intention, I assure you—to
heaven: “You're telling me nothing new,” that apostle of
free thought sighed, “they're all like that.” According to
him, 80 percent of our writers, if only they could avoid
putting their names to it, would write and hail the name
of God. But they do not sign their names, because they love
themselves, and they hail nothing at all because they
loathe themselves, according to him. Since they cannot
keep themselves from judging, nevertheless, they make
up for it by moralizing. In short, their satanism is virtuous.
An odd epoch indeed!!9

Here then is the atheism of Albert Camus. It is an atheism
that is dynamically concerned about the individual and his
society. And this social concern for the individual is a mark of
our generation. The Spanish Civil War, the World War, the
Resistance, the Hungarian Revolution, all these violent events
have been the fruits of an already spiritually “broken world,”
to use the phrase of Gabriel Marcel. This world was for Camus
a place of unredeemable distrust in regard to whatever was not
immediately and sensuously known by experience. The trage-
dies of the times aroused in Camus the spirit of never abandon-
ing man in his present condition of suffering. Repairing to God
for help was a premature, an immature, futile activity. There
is no time to waste in aiding men for “too many chariots have
already bogged down on the road and need human help to send
them freely on their way.” Forget the rendezvous of prayer and
repentance with God. According to Camus, man has already
grown beyond such childishness. Indeed, man has already
grown beyond dependence on the God of science as well.

Contemporary incredulity no longer rests on science as at
the end of the last century. Both science and faith are
denied today. And this is no longer merely the skepticism
of reason against miracles. It is a passionate unbelief.”

Siegmund calls the atheism of Camus an “inherited form of
atheism.” He explains that Camus, and most modern atheists
for that matter, are the intellectual offspring of whole genera-
tions of philosophers and literary savants who, from Hegel’s
time on, cultivated the cultural prejudice of no longer reflect-

19. Albert Camus, Tke Fall, translated by Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred
A. Kropf; London; Hamish Hamilton, 1956), p. 99.
20. Vie Intellectuelle, April 1949, p. 349.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 213

ing themselves, nor allowing others to reflect, through the cen-
sure of ridicule, on the scientifically formed proofs and the
existential insights recorded by thinkers and mystics in favor
of the existence of God. He quotes Fuerstenberg’s lament
against this close-minded, arbitrary intolerance of theological
discussion as being “a sorry example of a tabu which is itself
dogmatic, unskeptical and unscientific.” Like many of his pred-
ecessors, Marx in particular, Camus simply accepted atheism
as a fact no longer needing proof nor any further intellectual
probing. Hence he never posed this ultimate question. He ac-
cepted the premise that existence had no meaning. This prem-
ise had to be true because of the desperate feeling of the absurd
that ravaged his own soul and was so widespread in the war-
torn world around him. Blanchet’s insight on this matter is
quite perceptive. Camus insists on taking absurdity as a start-
ing point because he is an atheist “by birth” and “from his sense
of solidarity” with his disillusioned, disbelieving world.??
Camus identified himself with the masses. And for him “the
working masses, worn out with suffering and death, are masses
without God. Our place is henceforth at their side, far from
teachers old or new.”? Thus a society that had for centuries
walled in its inhabitants against a Transcendent God, a birth
and training within that theologically beseiged society and a
sense of solidarity with the suffering masses trapped inside its
walls “obliged” Camus to remain loyal to the cause of atheism.
He explicitly states this in his writings: “The movement of pure
rebellion is climaxed in the shattering cry of Karamazov, ‘If all
cannot be saved, what’s the good of saving one! ” Camus and
arch-rebel Dimitri Karamazov are agreed on this atheism of
revolt.

Toward the end of his life Camus’s atheism seemed to be-
come nuanced with a nostalgia for God. He protested that his
was not a disbelief of a banal sort. It is true that his distrust of
the Churches still possessed him before his violent end. Yet
between 1947 and 1951 there seemed to be a “lurch” in his
career towards Catholicism, for he had met some dedicated
Catholic fighters in his work in the Resistance who did not
share his belief that the human condition was fatally absurd.

21. Georg Siegmund, God on Trial translated by Elinor Castendyk Briefs
(New York: Desclée Company, 1968), pp. 415-416,
22. Albert Camus, The Rebel, (New York: Alfred Knopf), p. 303.

214 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

But he was frightened away by the Church’s retrenchments on
the priest-workers’ movements and by her warnings in
Humani Generis against dangerous doctrines. Camus saw in
these restrictions of the Church fresh signs of the absurdity of
the world which he had hoped to escape in Catholicism. Despite
his refusal to accept any restrictions against intellectual and
social activities that were beneficial to toiling man, Camus
maintained an intense interest in religious matters to the end.
On two occasions in 1957 he expressed his interest publicly. In
an interview given to Le Monde in August of that year, Camus
said:

I do not believe in God; that is true. But I am not an atheist
for all that. I would even agree with Benjamin Constant
that irreligion has something vulgar about it and... yes,
something trite.”

In another interview given to Daghens Nyheter in December
of the same year on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel
Prize for literature, Camus expressed with deep feeling these
sentiments:

Iam aware of the sacred, of the mystery in man. And I do
not see why I should not confess the emotion I experience
before Christ and his teaching. I fear, unfortunately, that
in certain quarters, especially in Europe, the avowal of an
ignorance or limit to man’s knowledge would only appear
as a weakness. If these admissions are weaknesses, then
Taccept them with strength. I have only respect and vener-
ation for the person of Christ and for his history. I do not
believe in his resurrection.“

In this last statement one senses the influence of Marcel on
a Camus progressing toward a deeper understanding of the
human person. The two dramatist-philosophers differed
strongly over Catholic Franco’s cause against Communism in
Spain. But this writer knows from speaking to Marcel that the
two became good friends, visited each other to discuss their
common concern for a free, humane society and that, as a
result of this mutual cordiality, Camus’s antagonism to faith as

23. Le Monde, Paris, August 1957.
24. Daghens Nyheter, Stockholm, December 1957.

Camus: The God of Absurdity 215

a possible help to the understanding of this absurdly brutal
world seems to have mellowed. Camus’s evolution as an atheist
seems clear enough. The challenge, revolt, choice of the absurd,
the agitated romanticism of the early years have all disap-
peared. True, Camus’s inability to express belief in God re-
mains, for he remains constricted by rationalism. Moreover, he
never gets beyond the facile, Gidean negations about the Christ
of the Gospels. Nevertheless, there is a real advance. Camus,
the atheist, venerates Christ and in doing so hungers for God.
Perhaps no expression in his works more graphically describes
the eternal tug of war in his soul between: defiance of the
absurd and concern to help others; love for the individual and
distrust of the collective; the rejection of God and the need for
transcendence than the words of Jonas the artist in Exile and
the Kingdom. Unsuccessful in solving the dilemma in his
professional life between the isolation needed to create and the
involvement needed to live, Jonas, after working months in
isolation on his masterpiece, collapses over a canvas found to
be completely blank save for one word in small letters at its
center. And the viewer of the canvas cannot tell whether the
word is “solitary” or “solidary.” In his own life, then, Camus
seems to have opted for a “religion” described in his first work,
L'envers et l'endroit, in these words: “Once again the worst evil
is to cause suffering.” An analysis of this atheistic humanism
shows that this religion is a humanism without a Church, a
rationalism without dogmas, a naturalism without cruelties, a
moralism without sanctions, an individualism without God.

CHAPTER VII

Sartre:

The Changing of His Gods

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE WAS BORN IN PARIS IN 1905. HE
studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in that city, and later,
in Germany, he attended Husserl’s lectures and studied under
Heidegger. He later taught philosophy at Le Havre and Loan,
after which he returned to Paris and taught at the Lycée Con-
dorcet. During the war, on his return to occupied France from
internment in a German prison camp, he played an active role
in the Resistance. One of his plays, The Flies, fooled the Nazi
censors who passed it, not realizing that under the guise of
Grecian mythology, Sartre presented as a hero Orestes who
revolted against the tyrant.Gods and killed their human Gau-
leiters in order to liberate the people. After the war he left the
teaching profession and since 1946 has spent his time writing
and editing the magazine Les Temps Modernes. His first novel,
Nausea, established him quickly as a giant in the literary
world. It probed concrete human situations which vividly ex-
emplified doctrines and analyses of reality previously pro-

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 217

pounded in his philosophical works. Novelist, dramatist, essay-
ist and philosopher, Sartre in all his works boldly admits he is
a man for whom “God is dead” and man alone is master of his
own destiny. Just about every literary work of Sartre’s is didac-
tic in essence. His dramas are thesis-dramas, that is, they dem-
onstrate, popularize, indeed propagandize, his philosophical
doctrines. His famous play, The Devil and the Good Lord, pre-
tends to establish the non-existence of God and the uselessness
of reward for the saint or punishment for the sinner. His novels
are also thesis-novels. They depict human beings as sickened by
the fundamental, metaphysical experience of nausea, that
realization of the primeval, intrinsic absurdity of all reality.
They represent consciousness not as a progressive conquest of
material beings, but as a “sickness of being” which creates
nothingness at the very heart of the fullness of being. Sartre’s
literary works demonstrate how freedom is a curse in man’s
consciousness, how man is condemned to be free. The novels,
plays, short stories—even the first installment of his autobiog-
raphy, The Words—depict human beings as trapped in a
spiritually decaying civilization complicated by social injus-
tice, war and psychological compulsions, yet inescapably called
upon to face up to their responsibility to exercise their liberty
for its own sake, in any manner and for any causes they them-
selves deem worthwhile. For there are no meanings to reality,
according to Sartre, save those that man. himself desires to
place there and “there is no difference between getting drunk
by myself and leading a nation.” In the novel, The Reprieve,
which is the second of a tetralogy entitled Roads to Freedom,
Matthieu Delarue receives a letter from Daniel Sereno in
which this pederast narrates his conversion to Catholicism. It
reads in part: :

... I am seen, therefore I am. I need no longer bear the
responsibility of my turbid and disintegrating self; he who
sees me causes me to be... And I say to God: Here am I.
Here am I, as you see me, as I am. What can I do now? You
know me, and I do not know myself. What can I do except
support myself? And Thou, whose look eternally creates
me—do Thou support me. Matthieu, what joy! What tor-
ment! At last I am transmuted into myself. Hated, des-
pised, sustained, a presence supports me to continue thus

218 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

forever. I am infinite and infinitely guilty. But I am, Mat-
thieu, I am. Before God and before men, I am. Ecce homo.!

Rationalist philosopher and free-thinking atheist that he is,
Matthieu is disgusted by this conversion and throws the crum-
pled letter out the window of the speeding train with the excla-
mation: “Quelles Vieilleries! [What rubbish!]” We have in this
reaction a true illustration of Sartre’s attitude to God, faith and
religion. Yet he was not always so hostile to religious realities.
A look into his childhood as depicted by himself in The Words
will reveal the early influences in his genesis to godlessness.

Because his father died when he was two years old, Sartre, an
only child, puny and delicate of health, was brought up together
with his child-mother at his grandfather’s home where, by his
own admission, he was thoroughly spoiled and developed into
a “bogus child.”

Until the age of ten, I was alone between one old man and
two women... I was an impostor... I could feel my actions
changing into gestures ... I had been convinced that we
were born to playact to each other . . . Lacking more pre-
cise information, no one, beginning with myself, knew
what the hell I had come on earth to do... But I remained
an abstraction ...I was not stable or permanent; I was not
the perpetuator-to-be of my father’s work; I was not neces-
sary to the production of steel; in short, I had no soul...
I felt superfluous so I had to disappear. In other words, I
was condemned, and the sentence could be carried out at
any time.?

Sartre goes on to admit his hunger for God as the solution to
his aimless existence. Brought up in the Catholic religion, he
looked for a remedy from emptiness in the Almighty, who
made him with a meaning and a mission. Existence for God’s
greater glory was an ideal that could have lifted him to fruitful
being. But the God he was introduced to at home, while fashion-
able, was unacceptable. He craved for a Creator and was given
a Big Businessman. He was disgusted with what his family had
to offer. He analyzed its failure to give him the true God. His

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Tke Reprieve, translated by Eric Sutton (London: A Pen-
guin Book, 1966), pp. 345-346.

2, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tke Words, translated by Irene Clephane (London: A
Penguin Book, 1967), pp. 54-61.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 219

family had been blighted by the gradual dechristianization
which was planted in the Voltaire-seeded haute bourgeoisie.
The weed of disbelief took a century to spread through every
level of society. In many a European family circle, faith was
but a religious name for the breath of liberty unleashed by
the French Revolution; baptism was a symbol of one’s inde-
pendence. To be on the baptismal rolls was to be considered
normal, a citizen. When one grew up, one could do what he
pleased about his faith. Anyway, in those days when Europe
was still nominally Catholic, it was considered harder to
acquire the faith than to lose it. On conditions in his own
family which were like the above, Sartre expatiated in the
following manner:

Charles Schweitzer (my grandfather) ... never missed an
opportunity of poking fun at Catholicism ... I was in
danger of being a victim of saintliness. My grandfather
disgusted me with it for good: I saw it through his eyes, and
this cruel folly sickened me with its mawkish ecstasies
and terrified me with its sadistic contempt for the body
... I was both Catholic and Protestant and I united the
spirit of criticism with that of submission . . . I was led to
unbelief not through conflicting dogma but through my
grandparents’ indifference.”

Although he testifies that he still believed and said his night
prayers before retiring, Sartre admits that his grandfather’s
anti-clericalism and anti-popery succeeded in turning his emo-
tions against the faith and he gradually thought less and less
often about the good God.” He then relates his final break with
God in an incident which drew from him anger and blasphemy.

For several years longer, I kept up public relations with
the Almighty; in private, I stopped associating with Him.
Once only I had the feeling that He existed. I had been
playing with matches and had burnt a mat; I was busy
covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt
His gaze inside my head and on my hands; I turned round
and round in the bathroom, horribly visible, a living target.
I was saved by indignation: I grew angry at such a crude
lack of tact, and blasphemed, muttering like my grandfa-

3. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

Pi š '
1

220 THE GODS OF ATHEISM. _

ther: “Sacré nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu de nom de
Dieu.” He never looked at me again.*

It would be misleading to conclude that Sartre simply as-
sumed atheism from then on without a look back. Unlike
Camus, Sartre was not accepting unexamined the atheism in-
herited from his family and cultural milieu. This tradition of
atheism was still too much perfumed with the fragrance of God.
Sartre wanted to cleanse it completely of any religious odors.
Thus, far from dismissing the problem of God as an absurd dis-
cussion about a nonentity, Sartre posed the ultimate questions
again and attempted to solve them to the satisfaction of his own
mind and temperament. He did this in two philosophical works,
his major work, Being and Nothingness, and another important
work, Existentialism and Humanism. That he felt he had
solved these problems to his own satisfaction is recorded in The
Words:

I have just told the story of a missed vocation; I needed
God; He was given to me, and I received him without un-
derstanding what I was looking for. Unable to take root in
my heart, he vegetated in me for a while and then died.
Today, when he is mentioned, I say with the amusement ~
and lack of regret of some ageing beau who meets an old
flame: “Fifty years ago, without. that misunderstanding,
without that mistake, without the accident which sepa-
rated us, there might have been something between us.”5>

Frequently, while reading passages like this in The Words—
and in all his works for that matter—one is forced to the conclu-
sion arrived at by Marcel “that there is in Sartre a certain taste
and propensity for scandal.” Yet Sartre is serious and impres-
sive in his philosophical efforts to establish atheism scientifi-
cally, whatever his psychological and cultural prepossessions
may be.

The Metaphysical Absence of God :

In Being and Nothingness Sartre, like Heidegger in his own
work before him, rediscovers and deepens his sense of the

4. Ibid, p. 65.
5. Ibid, p. 65.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 221

finiteness and contingency of all existence. He starts his reflec-
tions with “subjectivity,” with the idea of consciousness. We
experience that consciousness is always consciousness of
something. And that something is always a finite object quite
other than the conscious subject, although the subject is aware
of itself too in the act of its consciousness. Now our conscious-
ness of a thing does not bring that thing into existence, but
discovers it there in reality. Unlike Descartes, we do not have
to prove the existence of the eternal world in our conscious-
ness. The world is there already given.

Now neither beyond, nor under, nor above finite existences
does anything else exist. Nothing is really in existence save the
phenomenon of existence itself. Thus such transcendent reali-
ties as God, infinity and universal natures are mere chimeras.
Now the being of objects, the being of the world is called by
Sartre l’en-soi, that is, “being-in-itself.” This is the being of
experience, of phenomenon which the conscious subject ex-
periences, examines and knows. This transphenomenal being
is full of its own being; it is opaque; it is self-identical being
without any potency or abilities to change. Yet it is neither
created nor necessary being. It is simply there, gratuitous, de
trop, that is, superfluous. Now the other fundamental mode of
being is the being of the conscious subject. Sartre calls this
mode of being le pour-soi, that is, being-for-itself. Man is that
conscious being. Now conscious man is bound to reality and in
some inexplicable way has come forth from reality. Man too is
necessarily finite, uncreated, contingent, gratuitous, de trop or
superfluous. Conscious being, unlike unconscious being, is not
self-identical being; it has potencies, is able to change, indeed
is in constant flux. For when a man is conscious of something,
he is conscious of it by way of being a distance from, a negation
of, the object known. And here we discover the nature of con-
sciousness, of thinking, of choosing. Now what separates
conscious man from his object known is nothing. For conscious-
ness comes into being through the secretion of nothingness,
through the denial of reality, through the refusal to decide.
Thus, there is a rift, a fissure, a cleavage in “human reality”
which cannot be described because it is nothing. Thus, nothing-
ness lies at the heart of consciousness. Man is the being through
which nothingness comes into the world. Sartre does not say

222 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

that consciousness achieves separation from its object, that is,
that being-for-itself is totally separated from being-in-itself.
For conscious man is constantly reconstituting himself as sepa-
ration from in regard to every particular object experienced. As
we have seen, consciousness is always contingent, always de-
pendent on the being of phenomenon, though always seeking in
vain to become united with it.

Now man, as conscious being, not only separates himself
from objects external to himself, but he also separates himself
from himself by constituting his past as unchangeable, phe-
nomenal history. Man’s being is temporal, historical. Indeed
time is created by his consciousness. Thus the world of history
comes into being by the act through which conscious man sepa-
rates himself from phenomenal. being by projecting himself
into the future. How does conscious man separate himself from
his past? By his exercise of liberty, according to Sartre. Man is
always far more than his past because he is constantly project-
ing himself from it moment by moment into the future by
freely denying what he is so as to become what he is not yet,
something other than his being. His body, opinions, feelings,
desires and projects are constantly changing. Man is an exis-
tence seeking his essence, what he is to become through the
exercise of his freedom. The true me is presently unknown, in
as much as I am free to continue constituting myself through
the exercise of my liberty, until death supervenes and extin-
guishes all my possibilities. Death alone reduces conscious be-
ing to én-soi, to being-in-itself—immutable, self-identified,
forever unconscious. The dead man is reduced to being equated
with his whole past and to remaining forever nothing but an
object for the living.

Man’s freedom can thus be described as man separating him-
self from his past “by secreting his own nothing.” Man’s es-
sence is what he freely makes or made of himself up to the
moment of death. Thus man is forced by his freedom to flee
himself in order to catch himself. Yet he never consciously
escapes nor catches up with himself. He is really fleeing into
nothingness, nowhere, haunted by his perpetual instability and
contingency. He would gladly put an end to this eternal exodus
and the anguished nausea of always losing and never finding
himself. He would love eventually to become equal to himself,

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 293

to capture the solidity and permanency of his body—l’en-soi,
being-in-itself—which as transphenomenal being is non-tem-
poral, fully itself and absolute. Man actually strives to fill the
nothingness of his freedom with the plentitude of peace that
comes from the plentitude of being. The whole fundamental
project of each man’s existence, in his flight into the future, is
to achieve this self-identity of being-in-itself without, however,
ever losing the consciousness of being-for-itself. It is the drive
for the unification of pour-soi with en-soi, toward conscious-
ness’ self-grounding as conscious being-in-itself, so as to over-
come the basic metaphysical experience—nausea and the
affliction of contingency. But his ideal is doomed to failure. It
is an impossible project. For consciousness is presence to one-
self through distance from oneself, whereas being-in-itself is
necessarily absence or that fissure or rift so essential to con-
sciousness.

Now the unification of pour-soz-en-soi in one subject, if
raised to infinity, would constitute the person of God, the Infi-
nite, Free, Absolute Plentitude of Being—the infinitely con-
scious self-identity. But consciousness and self-identity are
mutually exclusive. Thus God not only does not de facto exist.
God really cannot exist. The idea of God is a contradiction.
There can be no God. And hence man’s striving after God is
doomed to utter failure. For God is the same thing as the ab-
sence, the metaphysical absence and impossibility of all being.
Here, then, is Sartre’s final judgment, after some seven hun-
dred pages of metaphysical virtuosity in Being And Nothing-
ness. God is merely the imaginary cure for the incurable
cleavage that exists at the center of human beings. He is an
illusion for man nauseated unto death. Man’s longing for God
is irrational, unpardonable for if God could, per impossibile,
exist, his presence would demand the death of man’s free con-
sciousness. For God and other consciousness, God and other
freedom could not exist without the Absolute destroying the
contingent. Man commits suicide when he creates God. One of
the final passages in Being And Nothingness sums up Sartre’s
doctrine on the metaphysical absurdity of all reality and the
human project with polemical vigor and bristling contempt.
“The passion of man is the exact opposite of that of Christ, for
man loses himself as man, in order that God may be born. But

224 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the idea of God is contradictory, and we lose ourselves in vain;
man is a useless passion.”®

The Consequent Absence of Mandatory Morals

Sartre deliberately drew the logical conclusions from his
atheism, no matter how shocking they were. Indeed, the more
scandalous the conclusions the more shameless he is in forcing
men to face them. He takes a measure of pride in his brutal
honesty. In a passage reminiscent of St. Paul’s, “I have fought
the good fight; I have finished the course; I have kept the faith.
For the rest, there is laid up for me a crown,” Sartre writes:
“Atheism is a cruel, long-term business. I believe I have gone
through it to the end. I see clearly; I am free from illusions; I
know my real tasks and I must surely deserve a civic prize.””
Again at the end of his famous lecture, Existentialism and
Humanism, delivered at the Club Maintenant and repeated
privately to afford his opponents an opportunity to state their
objections, Sartre concluded: “Existentialism is nothing else
but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently
atheistic position.”®

Now the most important conclusion which Sartre drew from
his atheism was this: Since there cannot be any God, there
cannot be logically any universally mandatory moral law;
there cannot be any absolute fixed values. Dostoevsky was right
when he wrote, “If God did not exist, everything would be per-
mitted.” And that is existentialism’s starting position. Man
alone creates his own values; he is incurably free. Man is
freedom. There are no values nor commands from above, nor
from within himself—as from a permanent nature—that can
legitimize his conduct. Man is alone, with the full responsibil-
ity to create himself through the exercise of his freedom.
Thrown into an absurd world, he must choose his own values
for he cannot help acting in this world. Even should he opt for
suicide, he does not escape choice nor action. Certainly his acts
are performed with motives, but he chooses which motives he

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, transl. by Hazel E. Barnes (Lon-
don: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1966), p. 615.

7. The Words, p. 157.

8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism And Humanism, translated by Philip
Mairet (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1966) p. 56.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 225

will make efficacious. And the choice of values and motives
depends on the project to which man chooses to commit him-
self. Thus, as a free, self-transcending subject, man inevitably
projects an initial, freely chosen ideal in the light of which he
constitutes his values. Man is the sole source of values, his
freedom being their foundation. Man alone is responsible for
everything he chooses or refuses,.for whatever he does or
refuses to do.

Man’s liberty is, therefore, unlimited; it is absolute. But then
also he bears an absolute responsibility. Freedom is always a
summons to action for needs to be fulfilled, for goals to be
achieved, for a personal history to be consummated. Though
the conditioning factors of life and its surroundings supply the
raw material of my motives and ends, yet I must choose to
assume and change my historical situation. Free actions pre-
vent me from ever coinciding with myself or any form of being,
no matter how radically I transform myself or my environ-
ment. There is no peace for man in life for freedom prevents
him from becoming a thing. The freedom which is my liberty
remains total and infinite, even though death haunts me at the
heart of each of my projects. Death is the reverse side of my
projects. Yet death is not an obstacle to these projects; it is
merely their destiny elsewhere; death is beyond my subjec-
tivity; it is there the moment I’m gone.

Moreover, man’s liberty is quite arbitrary. One man’s chosen
meanings, actions and goals for himself and this world are as
good as another’s, even if the two are contradictory. It is impos-
sible to demonstrate their “rightness” or “goodness” by show-
ing how each conforms to norms, structures or authorities
beyond freedom itself. Then too, man’s freedom is ambiguous,
precarious, since at any moment it may turn away and under-
cut everything formerly valued and achieved. For man is never
sometimes free and sometimes predetermined; he is either
wholly always free or never free at all. Now because of the
awful power and responsibility entailed in the exercise of his
freedom, man experiences dread in making his choices. For in
choosing, he is creating his essence; he is perceiving the “noth-
ing” that separates that essence from that choice. His percep-
tion of the “nothing” is the source of his experience of dread.
Man, thus, becomes conscious of his liberty in dread, in the

226 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

anxiety that he may destroy himself, his future, his goals by the
decisions and actions he undertakes.

Now it is from this dreadful experience of his nothingness
that there arises in man the temptation to flee the exercise of
liberty, to shun the responsibility of giving the world, his life
and his actions meaning and direction. The responsibility of
making himself and his world lies heavy on each man’s shoul-
ders. Yet the man who renounces his absolute freedom by refer-
ring his choices to God, or fatalistically to his predetermined
essence, his physico-psychological compulsions, his insur-
mountable environment, his Church, party or society whom he
delegates to do his deciding for him, such a man is in “bad
faith.” He is not a liar, for liars deceive others by representing
falsehoods as truths. Yet he deceives himself by attempting to
mäsk the truth from himself. And this is “bad faith,” inauthen-
tic existence. Such men are “cowards” and “scum.”® Of course,
the possibility of “bad faith” is always present; it is inherent to
the structure of consciousness and liberty. Only men in “bad
faith,” according to Sartre, live inauthentic, immoral lives.

It follows from man’s burden of absolute freedom and re-
sponsibility that he never has a right to complain. He should
find nothing foreign in life. For what he feels, experiences,
decrees or whatever happens to him are his own. Is he mobil-
ized for war? If he goes, it is his war; he has declared it, for he
could avoid going to fight by suicide or desertion. There are no
accidents in life. Every event is an opportunity for self-commit-
ment. The individual’s exercise of freedom gives each event
value and direction. Therefore, without remorse, regret or ex-
cuse, man, all alone, ought to carry the tragedies of the world
and not expect anyone to lighten his burden, for no one can.
Sartre admits that all of men’s projects are absurd and doomed
to failure in time and obliteration by death. If this is so, why
should man not rather succumb to despair and suicide? Why
commit oneself to a project which is “a tale told by an idiot
signifying nothing?” Because suicide, despair, flight are “bad
faith,” inauthentic, immoral existence. Freedom and its exer-
cise are Sartre’s absolute, each man’s absolute. Man should
exercise his freedom for its own sake, curse though it is, and in
any manner whatsoever. Sartre would have man live and die in

9. Ibid., p. 52.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 227

a manner which is the reverse of T. S. Eliot’s poetic lines: “This
is the way the world ends, this is the way the worlds ends, this
is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Sartre would have man remain committed to his project in life
until it all ends “not with a whimper but with a bang.” And the
bang is the explosion of liberty. Each man should go on living
vigorously, with defiant exercise of liberty, with the possibility
of sinning and damning himself in the exaltation of selfsuffi-
ciency. This is man’s meaning and glory, the exercise of his
liberty for its own sake. And it makes no difference how he is
exercising it so long as he is consciously exercising it. For all
human activities are equivalent, all, in principle, doomed to
failure. “And this amounts to the same thing whether one gets
drunk alone or is a leader of nations.”'°

Neither are there any calls from heaven for men to assume
special missions. Sartre demonstrates this teaching from the
life of a Jesuit he met while in a German prison camp. The
priest’s father died while the boy was very young. The family
sank into poverty. The boy became a charity student at board-
ing school with its inevitable social stigma. Because of his de-
pendent position, he was denied certain academic honors he
had earned. Later he was rejected by the girl he loved. And as
if that were not enough, his military training was a dismal
failure. Then the meaning of his whole sorry existence sud-
denly dawned upon him. God was calling him to work for His
cause in His vineyard. How else explain the concatenation of
catastrophes? He followed God’s direction and became a Jesuit
priest. Was all this God’s doing, really? “No,” says Sartre. That
man alone assigned those signs of tribulation their divine
meaning. He could just as easily have read into those signs
God’s call for him to become a carpenter. How explain that he
did not discover this meaning in his tragic existence? The an-
swer, says Sartre, is that the young man had no desire to be-
come a carpenter. Therefore, he alone was fully responsible for
becoming the person he became, because he chose to make the
Jesuit priesthood his project in life, and to interpret all events
as being meaningful for that goal alone.”

Ultimately, therefore, each individual creates his own being,

10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being And Nothingness, p. 627.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism And Humanism, p. 38.

228 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

values, history, world-meaning and moral law. As a free sub-
ject, isolated and alone, each individual, in his isolation and
loneliness, constitutes his world and cuts his own tablets of
moral law. But what happens when individuals confront each
other with conflicting worlds and morals? The answer to this
question leads us to Sartre’s social philosophy.

The Social Impossibility of Interpersonal Love

We have thus far seen in Sartre’s philosophy that nausea is
the primal metaphysical experience of man’s consciousness of
the absurdity of the world. Simultaneously, dread is the funda-
mental moral reaction over the “nothing” secreted and per-
ceived by man in the exercise of his absolute freedom. We have
also discussed the sheer futility and impotency of man’s practi-
cal striving toward self-unification in conscious self-identity;
in a word, the impossibility of his becoming God himself. Now
we will investigate the estrangement which Sartre tells us is
the basic, inherent characteristic of man’s relationship to his
fellow man.

When Sartre removed the divine Other, he still had to con-
tend with the plurality of intelligent subjects. Hegel found the
existence of so many other intelligences scandalous. He ar-
ranged things so that his One Spirit would descend into history
and eventually remove this scandal by absorbing all other intel-
ligences into his totally self-conscious Spirit. For Sartre too, the
presence of anyone else is an intolerable situation. “The first
duty of the creature,” he had taught, “is to deny its creator.”
That dismissed the Absolute Other. But there was not much he
could do about the indignity of being surrounded by a world of
other free individuals. He could not free himself from their
circumscribing looks and intrusions into his life. His infant’s
resentment at the presence of others, therefore, should be kept
in mind as one studies his analysis of the interpersonal rela-
tionship.

According to Sartre, the interpersonal relation is one of isola-
tion; its social atmosphere is one of conflict. “While I attempt
to free myself from the hold of the other, the other is trying to
free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the other, the
other seeks to enslave me. . .Conflict is the original meaning of

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 929

being-for-others.”!? And the first hostile act in the conflict is
inflicted by the “look.” The other as.look dispossesses me, steals
my freedom, reduces me to an object to be used for his interests.
The other breaks into my egocentric consciousness, reveals to
me my nakedness, limitations, contingency. Indeed, the other
regarding me as I cannot regard myself, holds a secret against
me. The other haunts me continually with the suspicion of the
existence of the Absolute Other. Why? Because the essential
interpersonal conflict over unification in love is the same sort
of illusion as the conflict of contradictory beings—en-soi-pour-
soi—in God. It follows that love is as impossible as God. There
can be no love, therefore there is no love between human be-
ings. How does Sartre explain this impossibility?

Ican never “get inside” the other’s subjectivity. We are intru-
sions into each other’s lives, without ever being able to control
each other’s freedom or subjecthood. And love is the project
seeking this control. Thus, the ‘interpersonal relationship re-
mains essentially one of isolation while paradoxically func-
tioning as attack and counterattack to reduce each other into
objects through the complete domination of the other’s liberty.
Unity with the other is, therefore, unrealizable both in theory
and fact. Its realization would necessarily entail, as in Hegel’s
dialectically evolving Spirit, the annihilation through absorp-
tion of the other.

Now love is the primitive relation to the other. It is man’s
project for possessing not merely the body, but the liberty, the
whole person of the other. Love wants to reduce the other “to
being a freedom subject to my freedom.”"* Love, as a unifica-
tion or fusion of two freedoms, is destined to eternal frustra-
tion. In all his novels and plays, Sartre’s characters try to engulf
the freedom of the other. But though separation is surpassed,
isolation is never surmounted even in the most intimate of
relations. Lovers strive to become absolutes, the ultimate
meaning of life to each other. Instead they remain outsiders,
strangers to each other. “My original fall is the existence of the
other,” Sartre writes." For, in terrible reality, to love is to
choose to be either dominant or dominated, or each in turn. At

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being And Nothingness, p. 364.
13. Jean-Paul Sartre, pene and Nothingness, p. 366.
14. Ibid, p. 263.

230 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

its maddest extremes, love may drive one to transform himself
for the pleasure of the other into a thing; love then becomes
masochism. Or at the opposite extreme of madness, love may
attempt to pulverize the other for its own pleasure and power;
love then becomes sadism. But these perversions are merely
the bipolar sexual extremes of the love-project which is inher-
ently contradictory. Love is the futile, endless attempt to merge
two bodies, two liberties, two selves. This sado-masochistic
love-project pervades the whole work of Sartre as an ineradica-
ble stain. Every other subject for him is a “drain” through
which my universe leaks away. Others steal my world, my per-
son, my liberty. And the persons in his drama Huis Clos (No
Exit) discover to their despairing frustration that “L'enfer,
c'est les Autres; “Hell is other people.” Adam’s original sin or
fall was not the eating of the apple; it was the arrival of Eve.
For sin, as the failure and fall of man’s being, is the presence
of others. Now far from reconciling me to myself, the intrusion
of others shocks me into a realization of the cleavage within
my own conscience. In Sartre we are back again to Hegel’s and
Nietzsche’s Master and Slave relationship and morality. The
lover seeks the mastery of his beloved whom he must enslave;
he demands “the beloved’s freedom first and foremost.”!5 From
the enterprise of seduction, which begins with the look,
through language, indifference, desire, to the perversions of
hate, masochism and sadism, Sartre has few peers as an ana-
lyst of the techniques used by man to dehumanize his fellow
man. Thus love in Sartre displays a triple power of destructibil-
ity. First, it deceives man into striving to become the Absolute
Other, to attain a unification hopelessly out of reach. Thus it
begets in man perpetual dissatisfaction. Second, through love
the other reduces me to an object, thereby afflicting me with
perpetual insecurity. Third, the presence of many others be-
sides my beloved threatens our mutual, absolute relationship
thereby arousing in us perpetual shame.'*

In the drama The Devil And The Good Lord, Heinrich, the
Bishop of Worms who betrays the city to.its besiegers, expresses
Sartre’s convictions on the impossibility of inter-personal love
in this absurd world.

15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being And Nothingness, p. 370.
16. Ibid., p. 377.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 931

... God had made it impossible for man to do good on
earth... Completely impossible! Love is impossible! Jus-
tice is impossible! Why don’t you try and love your neigh-
bor? You can tell me afterward what success you had...
If only one man should hate another, it would be sufficient
for hatred to spread from one to another and overwhelm
mankind... The world itself is iniquity; if you accept the
world, you are really iniquitous. If you try and change it,
then you become an executioner. The stench of the world
rises to the stars.”

The Rage Against God

Whatever life and strength it has, all atheism, negative or
positive, has its power from its awareness of God. It is a para-
site that feeds on God. Comte and Marx substituted Humanity
—the scientific priesthood and the proletarian masses—as the
God of positivism and socialism who would explain, justify and
fulfill the course of world history for the temporal happiness of
society. Sartre, on the other hand, divinizes the individual.
Each individual, in his absolute denial and rejection of God,
establishes himself as the ultimate creator of meaning, mis-
sions and morals in a world of endless discord and contra-
diction. The only authentic enterprise capable of achieving
human greatness is the life totally committed to the revolt
against God, religion of any kind, but especially against Chris-
tianity. It is hardly surprising, then, that throughout his liter-
ary works Sartre challenges man to act alone, boldly, without
any other justification for his deeds than to defy and destroy
God. In The Flies, Orestes has just killed his mother in an act
of rebellion against the whole moral order of God. He flings this
defiance into the face of the offended God: “You will have no
power over me except the power which I myself acknowledge.
You created me but you did not have to create me free. You are
God and I am free. We are both equally alone.”*

In the drama, The Devil And The Good Lord, Sartre sets out
to prove that God does not exist and that, even if he did, he

17. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil And The Good Lord, and Two Other Plays,
transl. by Kitty Black (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 62-63.

18. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays, transl. by Stuart Gil-
bert, (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 122.

232 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

would be a cruel, useless tyrant. His hero is a German cavalry
officer of the sixteenth century, named Goetz. Goetz performs
evil for the sake of evil, but above all because evil provokes
God. He rejects doing good because “what is good has already
been done . . . by God the Father. As for me, I invent.”® He kills
his brother and rejoices over the deed because by it he made
“God's heart bleed.” “God is the only adversary worthy of me.
I shall crucify God tonight,” he boasts, as he plans to massacre
twenty-thousand inhabitants of the city of Worms. The reason-
ing behind this prospective massacre is quite perverse. “God’s
suffering is infinite and that makes the one who makes Him
suffer likewise infinite.” When the prophet Nasti attempts to
persuade him to abandon his nefarious plan, Goetz objects vig-
orously:

But what do I care for mankind? God hears me; it is God
I am deafening and that is enough for me, for He is the
only enemy worthy of my talents... It is God I shall crucify
this night, through you, and through twenty thousand
men, because His suffering is infinite and renders infinite
those whom He causes to suffer. This city will go up in
flames. God knows that. At this moment He is afraid; I can
feel it, I can feel His eyes on my hand, His breath on my
hair, His angels shed tears. He is saying to Himself: “Per-
haps Goetz will not dare...” exactly as if He were a man.
Weep, angels; I shall dare. In a few moments I will march
in His fear and His anger. The city shall blaze; the soul of
the Lord is a hall of mirrors, the fire will be reflected in a
thousand mirrors. Then I shall know that I am an unal-
loyed monster.”°

When it is desperately pointed out to Goetz that to do good is
far more difficult than to do evil and infinitely more godlike, He
is fascinated with this reasoning, abandons his plan against the
city and agrees, on a bet, to live for a year and a day as a
hermit-saint. Goetz enters upon a strange Sartrean life of pen-
ance. He fasts and vows perfect chastity. Yet, despite this vow,
this remarkable monk continues to keep his mistress. But, of
course, the arrangement becomes perfectly reasonable when it
is realized that his mistress’s presence is essential to his peni-

19. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil And The Good Lord and Two Other Plays,

p. 46.
20. Ibid., p. 55.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 233

tential life, since Goetz also emplys her to whip him in a tradi-
tionally masochistic ritual. The conversion is never more than
a spiritual perversion, despite Sartre’s efforts to convince us of
its authenticity. The peasants themselves can smell its hypoc-
risy. In the end, a year and a day later, when the city of Love
he worked to establish is destroyed by war, Goetz, in bitter
disillusionment, turns on the silent God who abandons even
those who serve Him.

I alone. I supplicated, I demanded a sign, I sent messages
to Heaven. No reply. Heaven ignored my very name. Each
minute I wondered what I could BE in the eyes of God.
Now I know the answer: nothing. God does not see me, God
does not hear me, God does not know me. You see this
emptiness above our heads? That is God. You see this gap
in the door? It is God. You see that hole in the ground? That
is God again, Silence is God. Absence is God. God is the
loneliness of man. There was no one but myself; I alone
decided on Evil; I alone invented Good.. I, man. If God
exists, man is nothing; if man exists ... Heinrich, I am
going to tell you a colossal joke: God doés not exist... He
does not exist ... Joy, tears of joy. Alleluia! I have liberated
us. No more Heaven, no more Hell; nothing but earth...
Farewell to monsters, farewell to saints. Only men exist.”!

Back to the life of crime goes Goetz with a vengeance. He
brings his comedy of good to an end with a murder. In a struggle
to the death with the possessed priest, Heinrich, Goetz stabs his
opponent mortally. His new cause is to be a man among men,
to fight for mankind’s betterment. He assumes command of the
peasant armies and plans a war against their exploiters. But to
do this successfully, he tells the prophet Nasti, that he must
begin again at the beginning. When Nasti asks what that begin-
ning is, Goetz explains:

Crime. Men of the present day are born criminals, I must
demand my share of their crimes if I want to have my
share of their love and virtue. I wanted pure love: ridicu-
lous nonsense. To love anyone is to hate the same enemy;
therefore, I will adopt your hates. I wanted to do Good:
foolishness. On this earth at present Good and Evil are
inseparable. I agree to be bad in order to become good...

21. Ibid, pp. 141-142

234 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

I killed God because He divided me from mankind, and
now I see that His death has isolated me even more surely.
I shall not allow this huge carcass to poison my human
friendships . . .22

Sartre is fond of attacking Christianity. His animus against
the Christian God seems to be a classic case of the souring of
a disappointed lover. As his estrangement from the Christian
God became more and more embittered, Sartre, after the man-
ner of a modern Voltaire, caricatured the image, dogmas and
history of the Christian religion. He loved to use its theological
language for the joy he experienced at always perverting it. He
held it against God that man was trapped in an absurd rat-race
of existence in a cruel world. He deeply resented the frustra-
tion and gloom of being superfluous. “I had been told over and
over again that I was a gift from heaven, much longed for,
indispensable . . . I no longer believed this, but I still felt that
you were born superfluous.”2?

Unfortunately, the relatives and friends of his family milieu
were incapable of introducing Sartre to the majesty of the true
God of revelation, the divine mission of Christ and the sublime
destiny of each man through his call to membership in His
Church. Sartre himself has spoken of a public dechristianiza-
tion which deplores the style and manner of the faith. He de-
scribes in piquant terms the family performance at Sunday
services. “On Sundays the ladies sometimes went to Mass, to
hear some good music or a well-known organist: neither of
them was a practising Catholic, but the faith of others helped
them to ecstatic enjoyment of the music. They believed in God
just long enough to enjoy a toccata.”24

Moreover, Sartre can never quite rid himself of the obsession
that God is looking at him. He fights against this vague menace
all his life, in his own experiences and those of his main liter-
ary characters who are really his alter egos. Just as the look of
God had frightened and angered him when he had set fire toa
mat, So too, on a memorable occasion when he was going to
school, he again encountered God and again had to dismiss
Him.

22. Ibid., pp. 145, 147.

23. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, pp. 104-105.
24. Ibid., p. 19.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 235

One morning, in 1917, at La Rochelle, I was waiting for
some companions who were supposed to accompany me to
the lycée; they were late. Soon I could think of nothing
more to distract myself, and I decided to think about the
Almighty. He at once tumbled down into the blue sky and
vanished without explanation: He does not exist, I said to
myself, in polite astonishment, and I thought the matter
was settled. In one sense it was, because I have never since
had the least temptation to revive Him.”

Sartre has not given the temptation to revive God the slight-
est opportunity to present itself. The reason is that he has been
so busy mocking and deriding the mythical God of the Chris-
tians. He has traveled a long road of estrangement from God
between the age of thirteen, the end of his life-period covered
by The Words, and his present exalted arrogance toward the
deity. As a boy, his parting with God vibrates with tremulous
regret and nostalgia. “I needed God... He was given tome...
Unable to take root in my heart, he vegetated in me for a while
and then died . . . there might have been something between
us.” Forty years later, regret and nostalgia have degenerated
into scornful derision. In perhaps the most blasphemous scene
he has created throughout his many dramas and novels, Sartre,
incarnated in Goetz, wallows madly in a Luciferian assault
against the crucified Christ. Goetz’s mistress, Catherine, in a
dying, delirious condition and pleading for a priest to hear
her confession, is brought to the church in the presence of
Goetz and laid at the feet of the life-sized crucifix. The priests
flee the church, refusing her any last sacraments. The faith-
ful remain to mock and consign her soul to hell. In a rage,
Goetz clears the church and, alone with the dying sinner,
addresses the crucified Christ, begging a sign of Catherine’s
salvation:

Lord, these sins are mine. Thou knowest it. Render to me
what rightfully belongs to me. Thou has no right to con-
demn this woman since I alone am guilty. Give me a sign!
My arms are ready; my face and breast are prepared. Blast
my cheeks; let her sins become pus oozing from my eyes
and ears; let them burn like acid into my back, my thighs
and my genitals. Strike me with leprosy, cholera, the

25. Ibid, pp. 155-156.

236 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

plague, but redeem her! Didst Thou die for mankind, yes
or no? Look down on us: mankind is suffering. Thou must
begin to die again! Give! Give me Thy wounds! Give me the
wound in Thy right side, the two holes in Thy hands. If God
could suffer for their sins, why cannot a man? Art Thou
jealous of me? Give me Thy stigmata! Give me Thy
wounds! Give me Thy wounds! Art Thou deaf? Good heav-
ens, how stupid I am! God helps those who help them-
selves! (He draws a dagger from his belt, stabs the palm
of his left hand, then the palm of his right hand and then
finally his side. Then he throws the dagger behind the
altar and leaning forward, marks the breast of the Christ
with blood.) Come back, all of you! The Christ has bled.
See, in His infinite mercy, He has allowed me to bear His
stigmata. The blood of Christ, my brothers, the blood of
Christ is flowing from my hands. Fear no more, my love.
I touch your forehead, your eyes and lips with the blood of
our Lord Jesus Christ ... Die in peace ... The blood of
Christ, Catherine.

Catherine dies in the presence of her new saviour with these
words: “Your blood, Goetz, your blood. You have shed it for
me,”26

Irrational Assumptions of Sartrean Atheism

It is now time to evaluate the symmetrical appearance of the
Sartrean synthesis of reality. His first exceedingly gratuitous
assumption is a metaphysical assertion. Rejecting previous
forms of dualism, Sartre apodictically presents, in the first
chapters of his Being And Nothingness, his own radical dual-
ism. It states that all being is divided into l’en-soz, being as it
is in itself, and le pour-soz, human consciousness. There is no
being beyond these. Now the world of objects, that is, non-
human reality, is so strong, so dense as to be completely mean-
ingless. By contrast, human reality is so weak, so contingent,
that it is confounded with nothingness. Radically, then, all be-
ing is absurd, superfluous. No proof is attempted to establish
the truth of this dualism. These are, in reality, a matter of
choice; no proof is needed for what one chooses to postulate.
Here is Sartre’s basic act of faith. The following six hundred

26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Tke Devil And The Good Lord and Two Other Plays,
pp. 101-102.

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 237

pages of his book elaborate and defend this metaphysical
dogma.

Whereas other thinkers explained consciousness in terms of
a spiritual dimension and higher fruition of the superior being,
man, Sartre holds the opposite. Other philosophers have dem-
onstrated that the world’s many characteristics of unity,
beauty, intelligibility, order and diversity, already present onto-
logically, become humanly actualized in the awakened and ap-
preciative mind. But for Sartre, the conscious mind is a hole, a
tear, a secreter of “nothing” in the otherwise solid wall of be-
ing. This perverse, unproven axiom sets up the specious proof
for the non-existence of God. For it establishes, by pronounce-
ment alone, the absence of order, meaning, direction in the
world. Discord, contradiction, nothingness, chaos reign at the
heart of each thing and within the ensemble of all things. The
two types of being metaphysically oppose each other; they ren-
der God, not only non-existent, but impossible. For God, in order
to exist, would have to be the self-identification of Infinite Con-
sciousness with the world of objects. But on Sartre’s initial
assumption, consciousness and the world of objects are mutu-
ally exclusive. Moreover, since there is no consciousness apart
from the world—for consciousness is always consciousness of
something—God not only does not exist, but creation ex nihilo
is also impossible. For creation would presuppose God already
existing as a conscious subject before there were objects to be
conscious of. Now this situation would deny the very nature of
consciousness. Of course, Sartre assumes here that God is con-
scious of beings other than Himself in a way that is identical
to man’s consciousness. But if we admit that God’s conscious-
ness is supposed to be like man’s in a univocal sense, then
certainly we cannot conceive God’s creating the world. Thus, by
an initially optional division of all being, by an imposition of
inherently contradictory definitions on these modes of being,
by the arbitrary announcement that God could only be the unity
of these contradictions, were they raised to the infinite and
personalized degree, Sartre has conveniently pre-arranged that
God not only does not exist, but cannot exist. For God would
have to be the identification of the ideal with the real, some-
thing consciousness reveals to be utterly impossible. The Sar-
trean atheism, therefore, is founded on the metaphysical

238 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

misinformation that all being is inherently: contradictory,
meaningless, absurd and superfluous.

Of course, the Christian thinker sees the basic error in Sar-
tre’s ontology. Consciousness is not a lack, a minus of being; it
is rather a fuller achievement, a plus of being. If man’s con-
sciousness appears for no reason at all, if it has no relationship
to an absolute consciousness, then all thinking is impossible.
For thinking is a pursuit that presupposes a pursued. And truth
is the reality so avidly pursued. Now if the thinking process
“secretes nothing” as its inevitable product, instead of grasping
fuller truth, then truth is non-existent and Sartre’s own philos-
ophizing is undermined. Moreover, the Christian mind sees no
contradiction in the unification of infinite, dynamic self-con-
sciousness and immutable, infinitely perfect being. For the
Christian this is exactly what God is, in so far as the human
mind can grasp Him darkly. God is utter, total Self-conscious-
ness, sheer Dynamism while simultaneously being pure, im-
mutable, permanent Being. For the Christian does not know
how these paradoxical characteristics cohere in the Absolute
Being; he cannot explain their presence in a positive manner.
Yet he knows that there is no contradiction, that these charac-
teristics are not mutually exclusive. And he knows this truth in
a negative way, from the very analysis of the concepts in-
volved. Sartre, in placing a contradiction between these aspects
of being, is concluding beyond the evidence that is available.
Moreover, what the Christian mind knows through the deduc-
tions of native reason in a negative manner, it also knows more
ampiy and positively through the revelation of faith. The one
God is infinitely self-conscious because He is three Divine Per-
sons. This God knows Himself perfectly in the Person of the
Absolute, Substantial Word. He loves Himself in the Person of
the Substantial Spirit. The Christian at least has the intrinsic,
metaphysical consistency of the concepts garnered from phi-
losophical reflection and the external, revelationary testimony
received from the God-Man to assert and defend his adherence
to God. Sartre has neither the one nor the other of these sources
of truth to corroborate his atheistic ontology. As a matter of
fact, Sartre never claims that his ontology can demonstrate the
truth of his atheism. It is with him more a matter of choice. In
the final analysis, God does not and cannot exist for Sartre

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 239

because Sartre wants it and prearranged it that way.

We pass now to the moral assumption for the non-existence
of God. It states that: God is irreconcilable with human free-
dom. For, if God as Absolute Liberty existed, then man would
be caught in the inescapable strait jacket of determinism. If
God the creator determines what it means to be human, then
freedom has vanished into man’s total dependence upon God.
But to be free means to be a subject, which is what man is. And
far from being produced as an essence according to a pre-con-
ceived plan of God, the “Superior Artisan,” man rather falls
into existence through the exercise of his power of choosing.
Thus, being totally independent of a non-existent God, man is
absolutely free to create his own values, whatever he will be-
come in himself and whatever the world will mean to him.
Sartre falls into the metaphysical trap of presupposing that the
definition of essence excludes freedom. Moreover, he merely
assumes that the definition of existence demands that it always
precede essence. Once again, as in the case of being, the origin
of liberty is utterly absurd; it has no metaphysical or reasonable
foundation.

On the contrary, the Christian sees that capacities come with
every new being, every new nature. Freedom is present as a
potentiality even before the child begins to exercise it. Where
does it come from? Sartre holds that freedom, like all being, is
superfiuous, absurd; it comes from nowhere. He calls freedom
a “sickness” of human existence. The Christian, on the other
hand, sees liberty as an essential qualification of the human
individual, a gift given freely by God with the gift of human
nature itself. True, liberty is an ambiguous power capable of
destroying its possessor according to his responsible or irre-
sponsible exercise of it. Once again Sartre makes God and man
free in an univocal sense; once again he fails to understand the
paradoxical nature of the freedom in God and the freedom in
man. If God’s absolute freedom were identical to man’s free-
dom, then, of course, we could not conceive how man could be
free. He would be a mere automaton or puppet directed wholly
by the divine decisions. But, of course, this is not the case; man
is conscious of directing himself by his own decisions. God is
absolutely free, yet He does not suffocate the freedom of man.
How are the two freedoms possible, if man is totally dependent

240 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

on God as a creature? We are again in the presence of a mys-
tery, a truth above and beyond, but not against, reason. But
Sartre superficially concludes that this relationship must pro-
duce determinism. Sartre rejects all mysteries, except the mys-
tery of the absurdity of all reality. For the Christian, freedom
is a mysterious gift from the Absolute Freedom; God. For Sar-
tre, freedom is a mysterious curse from the absolute Absurdity
of the World of Reality.

Yet Sartre is right and does man a great service when he
analyzes the relationship between anxiety and freedom. Each
person alone must decide whether he will seek the divine or the
demonic. Despite the awful responsibility involved, man must
not allow the feeling of dread to paralyze him. He must choose
or suffer the degradation of “bad faith” and immoral existence.
Sartre is unhappy about having to face life and its decisions
alone. It is most distressing to him that God’s support is una-
vailable. For man, isolated and unsupported, is condemned to
invent himself every moment. In this nostalgic analysis Sartre
unwittingly witnesses to the truth that God is real, that He stirs
the soul of man by arousing his metaphysical hunger, con-
science and liberty for the Absolute Other. Man cannot remain
unmoved when he contemplates the abyss between God and
himself, between reason and revelation, between the message
from God and the message from himself. Sartre again serves
man well by insisting that his misgivings over these sacred
decisions cannot be surmounted merely by dispassionate
proofs, norms and principles. Witnessing to truth and moral
causes must also be made through decisive action. Truth and
meaning are not only attained in thinking but also in action.

But Sartre’s conclusion is all wrong. Man does not have “to go
it alone” in an absurd world with the desperate exercise of his
unlimited freedom. God and religion are not merely human
projections, as all intellectual atheists from Hegel to the pre-
sent teach. The reality of God is quite compatible with each
man’s reason and freedom, since Absolute Intelligence and Lib-
erty is essentially diffusive of itself and is the very source of
man’s endowment with these spiritual powers. Thus in reality
the presence of God is not a projection, but a call to communion.
And religion is the dialectic of that communion, a dialectic of
truth and love, of sacrifice and self-donation. True, this com-

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 241

munion does not of itself remove anxiety from the human con-
dition, for during the temporal testing period of the dialectic
there is always the possibility of man’s fall into infidelity. Thus,
Sartre’s error consists in making man’s freedom the whole
meaning and story of life. The unrestricted exercise of each
man’s freedom cannot begin to give an adequate account of the
world, human beings, truth, morality and man’s destiny. To say
that it can is to identify all values—true or false, wicked or
noble—with the capricious choices of all men. From that er-
roneous principle there can only emerge a project for social
suicide. We now wish to evaluate that project.

What can be said of Sartre’s social assumption that intersub-
jective love is impossible? First, this teaching is built upon the
fundamental doctrines of atheism and the absolute freedom of
man. In that sense it is both an assumption and a conclusion.
It is an assumption in so far as it is not at all demonstrated to
be a universal truth. It is a conclusion in so far as it is a logical
result of Sartre’s break with the Absolute Other and his seizure
of unlimited liberty for each man. The Christian thinker re-
jects Sartre’s narrow explanation of the role of the other in
interpersonal relations. It is not true that the only role of the
other is to achieve the destruction of my subjectivity. Nor is
that my goal in relationship to the subjectivity of my fellow
men. The other is not always a hostile, conniving, seducing
starer, plotting how he can dominate me. The purpose of inter-
subjective relations is not to dominate or be dominated. It is
simply not true that no other intersubjective relationship is
possible than sado-masochistic interaction. It is a travesty on
love to reduce it to being merely one form of domination along
with seduction, hate, desire and cruelty. Christian thinkers re-
ject this sick analysis of man’s social relationships.

Commenting on the Sartrean explanation of the nature and
ends of intersubjective relationships. Marcel, philosopher of
communion and Sartre’s most trenchant living critic, writes:

It is clear that the whole of this dialectic, with its undenia-
ble power, rests upon the complete denial of we as subject,
that is to say upon the denial of communion. For Sartre
this word has no meaning at any possible level, not to
speak of its religious or mystical sense. This is because in
his universe, participation itself is impossible: this, philo-

242 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

sophically, is the essential point. There is room only for
appropriation.”

Indeed, Sartre’s rejection of grace and graciousness is so com-
plete that he even degrades the human activity of gift-giving
into a form of seduction for the purpose of dominating others
bodily and spiritually. His distortion of the essential nature of
the love of generosity is but a further hateful impudence
against the sublime reality of genuine mutual human love. “To
give is to appropriate by means of destroying and to use this act
of destruction as a means of enslaving others.” It is clear that
the root of Sartre’s metaphysical pride is that he refuses to
admit his creaturehood. He refuses to be gracious enough to
accept any gift. For him to receive anything in joy would make
love possible. But already he has proven that love is impossible.
For him to receive a gift is incompatible with being free. Indeed
a truly free being denies that it has ever received anything. A
free being is incapable of expressing gratitude, incapable of
giving because incapable of receiving. Thus, the joy of grati-
tude, the ecstasy of mutual self-donation, the communion of
beatific companionship are perverted by Sartre into satanic
sorties in social relations for the purpose of dominating and
depersonalizing others.

How, then, are men to be brought together for social action, if
love, friendship and mutual trust are impossible? As if delight-
ing in the fascination of exaggeration, Sartre calls for terror as
the only positive force that can oblige men to become social. Ter-
ror creates the collective consciousness needed for communal
action. Terror is the condition and cause of solidarity, even of
brotherliness, for it alone guarantees that “my neighbor will re-
main my brother.” “Sartre,” writes Molnar, “needs the drama of
extremes—fraternity growing out of terror which he omniously
calls ‘mortal solicitude’—in order to breed global collectivism.
In fact, it is precisely terror with its climate of fear which dis-
courages brotherliness and breeds violence.” 2

Christians see in the initial relationship of man with God, a

27. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence (New York: Citadel Press,
1968), p. 76.

28. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being And Nothingness; p. 594.

29, Thomas Molnar, Sartre: Ideologue of our Time (New York: Funk & Wag-
nalls, 1968), p. 109.

Sartre: The Changing of His.Gods 243

communication of gifts and a communion of destinies in
mutual love. The Transcendent Lover bestows being, dignity,
mission, destiny on man as the other whom He has loved and
called into His presence. The Transcendent Lover gives Him-
self freely without any hint of trying to dominate the freedom
of man, but rather honoring him with an invitation to collabo-
rate with His Benefactor in the venture toward human sanctity
and happiness. Neither is the No of conflict the only answer
men give to the call of their fellow men. Indeed, millions of
martyrs, confessors, virgins, saints from all walks of life have
answered Yes to the invocation of God to live with Him. And in
answering Yes to God, they have also said Yes to their fellow
men. Nor is the essence of man’s relationships incarnated in
the look of hate. For Sartre, every look is a look of hate, every
embrace a “kiss of death.” Granted that the kiss of Judas is
always a possibility, the fact is that it is not the only possibility;
it is not the only and predetermined eventuality in man’s social
life. If it were, where would be that vaunted, unlimited free-
dom Sartre claims for man?

There is also the look of love, genuine, disinterested, con-
cerned with the happiness of the other. This look expresses a
will to communion, to service, not to domination. The look of
God creates human persons: “I have loved thee with an ever-
lasting love, therefore, have I drawn thee, taking pity on thee”.
The Gospels record that the look of Christ raises up, restores,
saves man. The look of Christ melted Peter into repentance; the
look of Christ transformed Magdalene from sinner into saint;
the look of Christ raised in an instant with Himself into para-
dise a blaspheming thief on the verge of hell. The person of
every child is created by the loving looks of its parents and
relatives. The truth is that man thrives as a person under the
light of the approval of others. In the end, the look of love
conquers the look of hate. It is never Christ who flees the gaze
of Satan; it is Satan who flees the look of Christ and begs for
asylum in swine. But the look of love creates subjectivity in
both lover and beloved because in its expansive climate of
mutual self-donation the lovers achieve the plenitude of their
beings as persons. In every inter-subjective relation, in every
society the last word on its social vigor is not concerned with
the mind but with whether one loves. Sartre does not love; he

244 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

does not even love himself, for according to the abstractions of
his mind, love is an impossible ideal. Society is a jungle of
scheming tyrants seeking to dominate one another. Such a so-
cial philosophy can only beget a society of murderers or a so-
ciety of suicides, depending on whether men decide to seize
power or despair over attaining the grace of communion.

In the spirit of ethical adventuresomeness, Sartre attacks
what he calls “the spirit of seriousness” and equates it with
“bad faith.” When men appeal to a universal moral law in the
hope of dodging hard decisions, they are acting false roles.
When men immerse themselves in God, prayer, religious ser-
vices or transcendent activities of any kind, they are fleeing the
tasks of freedom for this life. Thus Freudians with their libidos,
communists with their classless society, Christians with their
heaven, anyone who deceives himself about the present duty by
concentrating his faith on the future, all these are hiding be-
hind “the spirit of seriousness” but living in “bad faith.” What
then is good faith in Sartre’s social philosophy?

Good faith is practiced by the man who works to liberate
himself from his own egotism and to collaborate for the free-
dom of others. Thus, when Sartre, in the day of the under-
ground Resistance, schemed and worked for the freedom of
France and French prisoners, he was living in “good faith,” for
he was living for others. This was certainly a morally good
activity. No Christian would quarrel with this selfcommit-
ment. But the question arises: How is such commitment to the
good of others possible under the Sartrean social theories? For
under this theory of universal social conflict in interpersonal
relations, such commitment to the welfare of others is well-
nigh impossible. According to Sartre, men do not know what is
good for other men since they have no nature, no values, no
liberty, no destiny in common. Moreover, each man’s exercise
of liberty is always aimed at enslaving others. Sartre’s theory
denies the possibility of common sociality among men, yet in
practice he now demands self-commitment. to others. More-
over, his phenomenological descriptions of interpersonal ac-
tivities stress egotism and conflict, frustration rather than
social fruition. It is this inconsistency between doctrine and
deed that has led the Marxists to dismiss Sartre’s thinking as
“the last, convulsive effort of the alienated individual in a dy-
ing bourgeois world.”

Sartre: The Changing of His Gods 245

For all its vaunted phenomenological method, Sartre’s phi-
losophy is in its main themes a product of pure subjectivism, a
creation of a mind divorced from concrete reality. Sartre, is, in
a word, the worst kind of rationalist, the kind that expresses
contempt and irreverence for concrete reality and favors a
towering love for the disembodied mind. He himself testifies in
The Words how he became that way:

A Platonist by condition, I moved from knowledge to its
objects; I found ideas more real than things, because they
were the first to give themselves to me and because they
gave themselves like things. I met the universe in books:
assimilated, classified, labelled and studied, but still im-
pressive; and I confused the chaos of my experience
through books with the hazardous course of real events.
Hence my idealism which it took me thirty years to undo.*°

The truth is that Sartre is still confusing “the chaos of my
experience through books with the . . . course of real events.”
The truth is that even today he has failed to undo his idealism
or rationalism. Who, but a man hopelessly divorced from the
hostile to the sacred, concrete mystery of parenthood, could
have written this unrealistic nonsense against human love:
“The rule is that there are no good fathers; it is not the men who
are at fault but the parental bond which is rotten. There is
nothing better than to produce children but what a sin to have
somet”?!

It is tragic to watch Sartre move from idol to idol in a vain
effort to replace his banished God. The sign of the sacred has
shifted from Catholicism to belles-lettres, to fame as a writer,
to revolution on behalf of social causes under the banner of
socialism and Marxism. Today Sartre admits his complete
disillusionment over his chosen idols: “. . . I know quite well that
no one is waiting for me. I have renounced my vocation but I
have not unfrocked myself. I still write. What else can I do?”

Sartre has rendered mankind some useful services. He has
analyzed sin with deep penetration. It is the bitter estrange-
ment from God and from our fellow man. It is the great divine-
human schism. He has exploded the secularized myths that

30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Tke Words, p. 34.
31. Ibid., p. 14.
32. Ibid., p. 157.

246 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

guarantee man happiness in and through temporal achieve-
ments. No present, no future earthly condition of man will ever
make life worth living. He has stressed once again, in a stark
manner, man’s personal responsibility for making his own be-
ing and world. He has focused the mind and heart of man on
his great power of freedom with all its dangerous possibilities.
He has ruthlessly unmasked the poses men take to escape hard
decisions. He has re-created the confrontation between free-
dom and grace. He has forced the collectivized atheism of Posi-
tivism and Marxism to come out from behind their protective
wall of science and politics in order to prove to the individual
that absurd existence is worth living. He has put their panaceas
to a severe test.

But in the last analysis Sartre’s philosophy leads logically
and directly to despair and suicide. His doctrine of salvation
leads man to the abyss of social atomism. His first and final
word on life, liberty and love is that they just happen and are
always absurd, contradictory and doomed to frustration. His
world of atheism is a kingdom of nothingness plunged into
intellectual darkness, convulsed with spiritual hate and peo-
pled by inhabitants who curse God and destroy each other in
their vain attempt to seize His vacant throne.

CHAPTER VIII

p4
i

Heidegger:
"Waiting for the New God"

PERHAPS THE MOST PROFOUND CONTEMPORARY
source of inspiration for the “death of God” school of philoso-
pher-theologians is the systematic phenomenologist-philoso-
pher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was born in 1889 in
` Messkirch, a region in the Black Forest of Swabia. A man who
has remained close to the soil while developing into a solitary
thinker, Heidegger has never left this austerely beautiful land
high up in the mountains. He was brought up a Catholic and for
a short time was a novice in the Society of Jesus with the aim
of studying to be a priest. Before developing his own thought,
he learned Scholastic thought well, passed through the training
of the Neo-Kantians and subsequently experienced the direct
influence of the great Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.
In fact, it was in close contact with Husserl, to whom he later
dedicated his master work, Being And Time, that he worked
out his own method of philosophical analysis and exposition. In
1927, while Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mar-

248 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

burg, he published his greatest work, Being and Time. His first
published work had been his thesis for lectureship, Duns Sco-
tus’s Doctrine of Categories and Concepts.

Heidegger openly took his philosophic stand and orientation
in the European tradition of philosophy, but he boldly ambi-
tioned becoming its modern Aristotle, his main aim being to
construct an ontology whose new basis would finally answer
the long-neglected question: “What is the meaning of ‘Being’?”
He was convinced that neither Aristotle himself nor the long
line of great Western thinkers since him had addressed them-
selves properly to this problem. In the course of pursuing the
solution to this central problem, Heidegger coins his own tech-
nical terminology. It is extremely unfamiliar and extraor-
dinarily hard to cope with even for the professional
philosopher. For in taking up the meaning of being afresh,
Heidegger admits he will have to destroy traditional ontology.
Thus he makes use of the peculiar, run-on word structure of the
German language, often resorting to elaborate puns to express
the content of his reflections. An eminent classicist, master of
Greek and Latin, he digs back into the root meanings of words
to develop startling neologisms that substitute new meanings
for old, familiar ones. If this philosopher is so ambiguous and
well-nigh impossible to decipher, it may be asked, “Why bother
to tax the minds of readers with a discussion of his thought at
all”?

The reason is, as we have indicated above, that Heidegger has
had and is still having an all-pervading influence upon the
existentialists. Though Heidegger has dissociated himself from
Sartre and emphasized their differences, he and Sartre are still
in agreement on some important points. Both these philoso-
phers set out to establish a universally valid philosophy whose
main concentration is the existence and not the essence of
things. Theirs is an existential, phenomenological ontology. Its
purpose is to answer the question: “What is existence; in what
does the being of existence consist?” Both analyzed the
“Cogito” of Descartes and renounced it because his abstrac-
tions fail to reach the being of existence. Both replaced Aristot-
le’s and Kant’s abstract categories of being with their own
phenomenological, existential categories to describe the phe-
nomenon of existing things. According to Sartre and Heidegger,

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 249

this description alone has the value of proof because it unveils
the evidence of the phenomenon of concrete existences under
all their aspects. Moreover, Heidegger and Sartre agree that
man’s fundamental personality is established by his free
choice of his destiny, a choice that has no other justification
than itself and is the first, absolute principle in the human
being, that which explains his whole life. Then too, Sartre’s
conception of Nothingness reflects Heidegger’s direct influence
on him. Moreover, if one examines contemporary Protestant,
existential theologians, one finds that Heidegger’s influence on
them is vast. The thought of such theologians as Brunner, Bult-
mann, Tillich, Van Buren, Robinson and many others is steeped
in Heideggerian thought-forms.

In 1929 Heidegger succeeded Husserl at Freiburg to the Chair
of Philosophy where he continued to teach until the end of the
Second World War. He supported the Nazi regime when it came
to power in 1933 and, in the same year, was elected Rector of
Freiburg University. Though he later became disillusioned
and resigned his post as Rector in 1934, he never publicly re-
jected Nazism. As a result of this entanglement, he was for
some time forbidden to teach in Germany when the Allies be-
gan their occupation. Today, however, he continues to write as
a recluse and his influence in the world of thought is probably
greater than it was before the accession of Hitler to power. In
an interesting speculative exercise as to how such a profound
philosopher, whose thought stresses the independence of the
individual, could ever have been lured to favor Nazism, Roberts
advances four conjectural considerations.

First, his sense of closeness to the soil, especially his na-
tive Swabian land. Second, the influence of Nietzsche,
which prompted him to feel that Western civilization had
become spiritually bankrupt and that a radical trans-
valuation of values was needed. Third, mystical tendency
which had nowhere to go except to associate itself with his

1. In November 1933 Heidegger, just established Rector of the University of
Freiburg by the will of the Nazi Party which had been voted into power, issued
a proclamation to the students of the university. It said in part: “Not theorems
and ‘ideas’ be the rule of your being. The Führer himself and alone is the
present and future German reality and its law. Learn ever deeper to know: that
from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action respon-
sibility. Heil Hitler!” See Dr. Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” Review of
Metaphysics, XVIII, December 1964, pp. 207-233.

250 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

feelings about the homeland. Fourth, a stress upon reso-
luteness and courage which could easily be channeled in
the direction of political decision and martial virtues. But
these remain mere conjectures, and the qualities to which
they call attention have continued to characterize his
thinking since the Nazi debacle as well as before it.?

The Problem of Being and Human Existence

According to Heidegger, to inquire into the meaning of Being
is not a grammatical questing at all. It is rather a seeking of the
Being of beings. But what particular being is best suited for
study in the construction of a new ontology? The approach to
ontology via cosmology, the path taken by the classical philoso-
phers, has failed to consider the meaning of Being. Heidegger’s
new approach to Being is the being of man. He begins his search
for the meaning of Being by searching the being of the ques-
tioner himself. For man who raises the problem, as “being
there”— Dasein is Heidegger’s word for him—has a special re-
lation to Being. Man’s very investigation of Being is a mode of
being. But Heidegger has no intention of studying man for the
sake of giving a cultural or sociological or psychological ac-
count of him. For him, man is the most important instance of
being because man has the capacity to wonder and thus to
philosophize in a contemplative manner. Thus, man should be
able to discover the relationship between his own particular
being and the structure of Being in itself.

But what precisely is Being in itself for Heidegger? Is it the
absolute, ultimate Being, the utterly Transcendent Being in the
sense of God? No, for according to Heidegger, God, if He ex-
isted, would be a being among other beings. And Heidegger is
not interested in beings or a being; his whole concern is with
Being in itself; he is seeking the Being of beings. Thus, a study
of man, who raises the problem of Being, is primary and essen-
tial to the meaning of the Being of beings. For man alone
among all beings is open to Being and its existential structure.

Man being there (Dasein) is existence (Existenz). He cannot
be defined as a static essence, as a rational animal, because

2. David E. Roberts, Existentialism and Religious Belief (New York: A
Galaxy Book, Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 149.

t
4

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 951

man is always potential being, a potentiality of being. Continu-
ally in advance of himself, man projects himself into the fu-
ture, thus transcending himself. Ontologically man is a
being-in-the-world; this is his fundamental constitution, his in-
nermost essence. “World” is that whereto man transcends so as
to be what he is and to become what he is to be. Actually, man
is “thrown” into the world and left there to his own devices and
responsibility. There, in his “thrown” condition, man finds him-
self dynamically related to other things and persons. As a result
of this relationship, he exists, necessarily preoccupied and con-
cerned with “the other,” but not with this or that particular
other. Thus, active concern and preoccupation with other be-
ings-encountered-in-the-world is a constitutive characteristic
of man’s existence. For man exists as being-in-the-world in
advance of himself, concerned and preoccupied with the other.
As he moves forward to realize his possibilities, man is con-
cerned with the encounter with other beings and men. It is
through his concern and preoccupation that man constitutes
the world as a meaningful system of objects. His concern estab-
lishes objects in intelligible relations to one another and to
himself.

In his contrast between the world of men and the world of
things, Heidegger sees the world of objects as the world of tools
and utensils. Objects are instruments at hand; they exist for the
use of men. The sea zs for the fisherman what he drags in order
to get fish—food. It is, of course, quite another thing for the
merchant marine, the naval strategist or the sailing enthusiast.
Each takes his meaning of the sea from the inner concern that
constitutes his being. Thus, man is a being-in-the-world con-
cerned with things as instruments which will help him in his
drive forward to realize his chosen projects. Now man’s practi-
cal point of view of things is, of course, not his only viewpoint.
There is a great variety of perspectives and viewpoints. For one
example, scientists study the sea objectively, not as an instru-
ment, but simply to discover its physical composition. Both
viewpoints, practical and scientific, are useful but neither is
exclusively privileged. Preoccupation with things takes a vari-
ety of forms which give birth to different yet complementary,
meaningful systems. Man’s concern, of course, is not responsi-
ble for the stark “thereness” of things but for the meaningful

252 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

patterns and systems which form his individual world. Each
man discovers himself as an individual subject only as a being
“thrown” there within the world and as a subject in relation
with other subjects.

Social being-with, social intersubjectivity adds another di-
mension to the constitutive being of man, complementing his
preoccupation with things as tools. Heidegger expresses this
dimension of man’s being thus. The human person is in the
world as a member of “the anonymous one,” (das Man). This
fundamental social interdependence reveals man as being im-
mersed in a maze of conventional mass human reactions and
as participating in established ways of feeling and thinking.
Being-in-the-world means being-with for man. Each individual
lives largely in terms of “what he does” or “what he does not
do.” Man’s private viewpoint arises only on the basis of a com-
mon world constituted by the concern which is a fundamental
characteristic of man seen as a member of “the anonymous
one.” “My” world presupposes the world of “the anonymous
one.” Man is, thus, not an isolated ego, but oriented toward the
realization of his possibilities. For he is a being necessarily
interrelated with the world of things and the world of persons.

Now because of his immergence in the world of things and
persons, man will never be able to escape completely from the
impersonal form of existence which roots him in membership
with “the anonymous one.” Yet man must make the effort. to
rise out of “the anonymous one” if he is to attain his true self-
hood. Two paths are open to each individual. First, man can
freely settle down in a life immersed in “the anonymous one”
so that he is absorbed in crowd-consciousness, thereby choosing
security and assurance at the cost of personal responsibility
and resolute self-direction. Once man does this, he sinks into
what Heidegger calls “unauthentic existence.” Or second, man
may, within limits of course, assume personal responsibility
for his destiny, freely choose his possibilities and, above all,
accept his destiny to death. This way of life would constitute
“authentic existence” for man. Thus, “thrown” into the world,
finite, abandoned to his own resources, and destined to death,
man is called upon to achieve the realization of his possibilities
and thereby to interpret the world in the accomplishment of his
chosen projects.

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 253

It is true, alas, that the ultimate possibility, one which annihi-
lates all other possibilities in the end, is death. Man is a being
who transcends himself dynamically toward the future, the
being who is “thrown” into the world and destined to death.
This tragic future presents man with a major decision, the
dilemma of how to live. Shall he interpret himself as just one
thing among others in the world and thereby subordinate him-
self to things? Or shall he pursue his possibilities in such a way
that they become the achievements for which he exists? If he
chooses the former way of life, he decides for unauthentic exis-
tence and thinking. If he chooses the latter way of life, he
enters the life of authentic understanding and existence. But
even if the decision is for the nobler, harder way of life, man’s
testing does not stop there. For the decision must be renewed
continually until death, since it is always possible to fall away
from higher resolves.

Perhaps the most important result of his obscure conscious-
ness of contingency, finiteness, dereliction and destiny to death
is man’s fundamental experience of “dread.” Heidegger distin-
guishes between “dread” and “fear.” Fear is directed toward
some definite being whereas dread is not. Dread is a fleeing,
panic reaction to a threatening'state of affairs, to “something”
which renders the very atmosphere of life harsh. Now because
he is free, man may attempt to flee the responsibility of his
possibilities so as to remain safe and secure at the level of “the
anonymous one,” thereby deluding himself that in this way he
will escape the experience of dread. He may plunge into the
realm of the commonplace, thinking, talking, doing trivia,
squandering his intellectual powers in curiosities, novelties,
gossip, in any superficial, uncritical undertaking that may dis-
tract him from the restlessness of dread. In a word, he may
choose to enslave himself in externalized anonymity. For Hei-
degger, this choice to flee his true selfhood, this decision to
become a bogus person is the fall that constitutes man’s Origi-
nal Sin. Nevertheless, man’s flight from his authentic self
never escapes the gravitational pull of dread; dread accompa-
nies man everywhere. That “something”—he can never specify
it as a definite thing—that is threatening him is as ever present
and inescapable as the air he breathes. While in this state of
flight and self-estrangement, man sees death as something that

254 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

happens not to himself but to “the anonymous one.” He thus
refuses to face and embrace dread, to live an authentic exis-
tence. Dread, therefore, destroys him as a true self.

But if he overcomes the temptation to fall away from his true
self to the groundless irrelevance of everyday anonymity,
man’s very experience of dread will be a force that drives him
to. the achievement of his possibilities. He will, then, attain the
plenitude of his true selfhood through an authentic existence
sub specie mortis. Instead of running away in dread to the
slavery of a bogus self, he will be running forward, despite
dread, to the freedom of his authentic self.

Pursuing his phenomenological scrutiny of human existence,
Heidegger then introduces what he considers the most funda-
mental characteristic of the human structure. “What is the
Being of Dasein?” he asks. “It is defined as Care,” he answers.
And Care (Sorge) is composed of three moments that reflect
man’s total situation. First, man, discovering himself in exis-
tence before he knows the meaning of existence, is concerned
with what he is to be. Existenz means being-in-front-of-oneself
or self-projection. Thus as man is Existenz, it must be asserted
that futurity characterizes him. Man’s running forward toward
his potentiality is the ground of his futurity. Care, then, is the
first element in his existence arising from his concern with
what he is to be. Secondly, man discovers he is in the world as
“thrown.” His concern over this “thrown” condition of his exis-
tence is the second constitutive element of Care. This phase of
Care grounds man in the past. Thirdly, man’s being-with others
in the world, his entangling relationships arouse particular
preoccupations that constitute the third element of his care.
This moment of Care grounds man in the present. Care, then,
is tri-temporal, but its primary element is futurity. Man is thus
structured in temporality in his inmost being. His being is,
therefore, projection from nothingness toward nothingness.
Once he has freely accepted his “throwness” into the world and
his relations there toward others, once he has willingly decided
to run forward toward his unique potentiality known as death,
which involves his existing no longer, man then authentically
constitutes his past and present by reaching out responsibly
toward his future. It is when man accepts the potentiality of his
death that he experiences the whole meaning of isolation, for

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 255

death severs all relations to others. Man has no possibility of
escaping the dread connected with his running toward his
death. Each man’s death is irreplaceable, though each man can
be replaced. Where death is the experience, no oné can take my
place. Each man has to do his own dying. Running away from
death through immature attempts to avoid dread only es-
tranges man from his innermost self and betrays the truth that
he is essentially preoccupied with death. The authentic atti-
tude toward death enables man to accept his potentialities and
their limitations. Sub specie mortis man is enabled to see all
other possibilities in their brutal finitude and, entering into
death as an inevitable personal experience, he will also be able,
through his ensuing experience of isolation, to accept the ex-
treme potentiality of his existence as that of a full and final
renunciation. Indeed, the very indefiniteness of the moment of
his death will then become for man, not an occasion for an
endless postponement of considering it, but the occasion for his
continual confrontation with the Nothingness of death. Dread
of death attunes man to Nothingness.

When he treats of the human. conscience in its relation to
authentic and unauthentic existence, Heidegger reveals his
novel doctrine on both conscience and guilt. Conscience, on the
unauthentic level of existence, merely listens to others in order
to join in accepting what is commonly said and done. But the
call of conscience on the authentic level of existence arises
from the true self. Speaking in silence, the authentic call of
conscience rejects the lure of the crowd and the commonplace;
it drives the true self toward its solitary accomplishment of its
potentialities. Authentic conscience arises solely from the self,
not from God, nor from social mores, nor from social pressures
or any source outside the self. The voice of conscience is that
mysterious source within man which, strangely enough, drives
the true self away from normal, daily human existence because
it finds this insipid, inadequate and destructive of man’s inde-
pendence.

Now it is the cry of conscience that awakens guilt in man.
Guilt is fundamentally related to a deficiency, the absence of
a mode of being which the individual might have become. Thus
all guilty feelings, arising from individual faults and evil
deeds, presuppose man’s basic condition of being guilty. Au-

256 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

thentic existence does not flee the experience of guilt; rather it
accepts the guilt of failure to realize one’s potentialities; it
makes use of this guilt as the starting line for human existence,
the foundation upon which the individual will project himself
toward his possibilities. Thus, man will choose his true self only
by embracing his own guilt. For, he will thereby heed the cry
of conscience which is the herald of authentic existence. Hei-
degger describes this willingness to accept dread, death, con-
science and guilt as an openness of being, a resolve to become
one’s true self even though forced to remain in the world tied
somewhat to “the anonymous one.” It is the spirit of this open-
ness and bold resolve that founds authentic man in genuine
human fellowship. Such resolve creates mutual understanding
among solitary, authentic individuals who transcend their dis-
mal surroundings by mastering them. Such resolve transforms
mere transitory activities into permanent deeds of inner devel-
opment. Heidegger rejects every attempt to locate the ultimate
source of conscience, guilt and resolve in an immortal self who
transcends the world and time. There is no self which is beyond
man in the midst of his world, beyond man’s time, dread, Care,
death. There is no Being who gives man his personal identity.
Personal identity has to be achieved by each individual in the
fires of resolution, isolation, independence, in the condition of
“throwness,” dread and destiny to death.

Heidegger proceeds to unravel the role of man in history. He
has already established that man can never exist outside tem-
porality. He revealed man as caught up in three “ecstasies”
(ekstasis: literally, “standing out”) of future, present and past.
Now man discovers the meaning of his own existence by study-
ing the history of mankind. Unlike brute animals and objects
which act and are acted upon by a process that is unintelligible
to them, man creates history as well as being formed by it. He
is the historical being because he alone reflects and makes
decisions, Volcanoes, canyons and mountains do not have a
“history” in the strict sense; they certainly undergo the pro-
cesses of change, but have no say in these changes. The same
is true of the animal world. It is man’s decisions that determine
the possibilities of authentic existence. Through these deci-
sions man can cull from the record of his fellowman. Man’s
reflections and choices enable him to use the past of history as

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 257

the launching pad to the future, instead of preserving the past
in an accumulating mass of petrified lumber. Man chooses to
perpetuate the valuable achievements of his heritage. On the
level of authentic existence this means that man is intelli-
gently selective of what he will conserve and perpetuate; he
does not blindly nor automatically conserve for the sake of
conserving. Man chooses to keep alive his kinship with the
genius and culture of the past ages. Consequently, the accep-
tance and perpetuation of tradition as a living presence is, at
the same time, the projection of the genius of this tradition
toward the achievement of man’s present and future poten-
tialities. Thus the core of history is found in individual exis-
tence. On the other hand, the unauthentic approach to history
reverses this process. Merely noting down what has happened,
it fails to analyze or take a firm stand on events and accom-
plishments of the past. Moreover, it sees the individual as an
insignificant moment on the unintelligible world process. The
objective approach to history is sterile because it never attains
reality; it merely catalogues it. Decisions alone lead man to
understand world history and his role within it. The reflection,
choice and authority of the free individual in judging history
are recognized by other free individuals only when that individ-
ual authority preserves and projects human achievements
worth repeating. Historical facts in themselves are dead and
meaningless; they come alive with pertinence to the present
and future only when they are related to man’s personal deci-
sions today because they were vital to man’s decisions in the
past. Subjectivism in this process of creating true history
through personal decisions will be avoided by fidelity to facts
and an immergence in a sound ontology.”

The Essence of Truth

In his discussion on the essence of truth, Heidegger continues
his “phenomenological destruction” of traditional ontology. He
does this by fitting his meaning of truth into an expanded con-

3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, transl. by John Macquarrie and Ed-
ward Robinson (Oxford: Basi} Blackwell, 1967). This is the magnum opus of the
author, containing his reinvestigation of the meaning of Being in a terminology
so new and difficult that we can only hope we have done minimal justice to his
thought in this section on his ontology.

258 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

text of his distinction between authentic and unauthentic exis-
tence. He rejects the traditional definition of truth as the con-
formity of the mind with the object. He objects that this theory
of truth is founded on Christian theology. As long as the human
intellectual and concrete things were viewed as created by God,
it. was natural to conclude that just as creation was in conform-
ity with God’s ideas of it, so, in an analogous manner, man’s
ideas could be brought into conformity with the world of crea-
tion, thus attaining human truth. God, as the intelligent, unique
source of an harmonious creative plan was the foundation for
the possibility of any human knowledge. So too, if truth consists
in conformity between thought and thing, then error would
necessarily consist.in the nonconformity between judgments
and the objects to which they refer. Now Heidegger is against
supernatural explanations of truth, for he holds that theology
is not needed to explain the essence of truth. That reason is able
to conform to the world should be obvious, for the human mind
develops in interaction with the world of other minds and
things.

How does the mind, then, conform to the object? Thought
differs so radically from the object that conformity between
them seems impossible. The object is concrete, material, spa-
tial; thought of the object is abstract, immaterial and nonspa-
tial. What takes place when thought represents things to
human consciousness without altering the things represented
as they are there in the world? Heidegger says that somehow
the object “comes across the open” into man’s conscious mind.
Now this openness and accessibility of the object cannot be the
product of the mind, neither man’s nor God’s, for consciousness
receives objects that are already accessible; it does not make
them accessible. Heidegger’s ontology, therefore, rejects the
process of finding truth in propositions created by the mind. For
him, truth cannot arise in the mind unless it is awakened by the
object. But this awakening is not an automatic process. Indeed,
to submit willingly to adherence to a truth made available by
the object calls for an act of freedom. Thus the difference be-
tween true and false thinking is grounded in freedom. Not that
the truth content of a statement depends as such on the act of
volition. The freedom indicated here is not the plaything of
caprice; rather it is the liberty which is constitutive of the

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 259

structure of Being. This fundamental liberty reveals itself as
saying Yes to what-is as it is. Such freedom willingly partici-
pates in the openness of things. Thus truth does not come about
by conformity between two utterly disparate beings—thought
and thing. Rather truth is created through the free participa-
tion of man in the luminous “coming across the open” of things.
Objects are the realities that open and reveal themselves;
minds are the consciousnesses that must expose themselves for
their reception. A mind exposes itself through participation in
the revelations of objects. Freedom and truth, then, coincide
where the participation of mind in the revealed nature of what-
is occurs. “The essence of truth is freedom,” says Heidegger,
emphasizing this statement with his own italics.* And, he con-
tinues, “Resistance to the proposition that the essence of truth
is freedom is rooted in prejudices, the most obstinate of which
contends that freedom is a property of man and that the nature
of freedom neither needs nor allows of further questioning.”®
In reality it is not man who possesses freedom as a property, but
rather freedom that possesses man. It does so in such an all-
pervading manner that it endows him with the relationship to
what-is-in-totality, a relationship that is a distinctive charac-
teristic of man in history.

When he goes on to treat truth from the aspects of authentic
and unauthentic understanding, Heidegger points to natural
science as a clear example of unauthentic understanding.
Natural science, through its process of technical domination,
falls into untruth by dissimulating and concealing the truth of
Being. For untruth is always a form of dissimulation. There-
fore, science as a source of real truth has to be debunked. Of
course, scientists gather many facts, announce formulas, de-
velop techniques and predict results. All this is done not in the
name of truth but of power and control. Scientists are not inter-
ested in the total being of any individual thing, in the what-is
or the meaning of Being. Thus they are never open nor attuned

4. Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, Containing: a) An Account of
Being and Time by Dr. Werner Brock; b) Remembrance of the Poet translated
by Douglas Scott; c) Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry translated by Douglas
Scott; d) On the Essence of Truth translated by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick;
e) What Js Metaphysics? translated by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick, (London:
Vision Press Ltd., 1968), p. 330.

5. Ibid., p. 332.

260 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to whatever is revealed by beings. That is why scientists fail to
experience wonderment or the magic and mystery of the uni-
verse and of existence. The scientist finds it a monotonous fact
that the sun rises and sets every day, for he is concerned only
with the mastery of things. Hostile to the revelatory character
of Being, scientists reject metaphysics in favor of technics and
manipulation. On the other hand, whenever what-is as a whole
manifests itself and man becomes attuned to it through partici-
pation, then this event of truth goes far beyond the petty
calculations of science. This event soars towards the incompre-
hensible, incalculable dimensions of Being. For it is mystery
that underlies participation in essential truth; it is mystery that
pervades the whole of human existence. Estranged from the
truth from the outset of his quest for knowledge, man often
mistakes his preoccupation with gathering facts about objects
as the essence of truth. This is the scientist’s great mistake.
Practical knowledge is not part of the revelation of truth. More-
over, to ignore the mystery of Being does not abolish it; neither
is it annihilated when it is neglected. The dilemma always
remains for man. He must choose between a world of projects,
plans, dominations and a world of truth and mystery. He must
choose authentic or unauthentic knowledge. To prefer mechan-
ics to metaphysics is to prefer estrangement from human
potentialities and reduction to the status of objects themselves.
To prefer the mystery of Being to the manipulation of things is
to accept the adventure of freedom to move forward toward
one’s highest possibilities and fullest, genuine self. Man is not
the measure of all things; he must return from mechanics to
metaphysics, from living in error to living in truth, if he is to
save himself from the tyranny of technologization and mass
society. Once again Heidegger brings us back to the courageous
resolve that is needed to make the decisions which will liberate
man from the masses mired in mechanics to join the solitaries
seeking mystery.

But the decision to live in genuine metaphysics will demand
another encounter with dread, Heidegger warns man. The es-
sential miseries of human existence stem from the fact that
Being also contains the negation of what-is. Being-there (Da-
sein) affirms simultaneously the essence of truth and the ex-
treme non-revelation of truth. Thus Being and Nothingness
hang together. This is true, according to Heidegger, “because

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” . 961

Being itself is finite in essence and is only revealed in the Tran-
scendence of Dasein as projected into Nothing.’ But it is dread
which reveals Nothingness. Thus the man who resolves to pur-
sue the mystery of Being is also prepared to suffer the dread of
Nothingness. For man’s freedom, which is grounded in Being,
is simultaneously founded in Nothingness. When man, there-
fore, participates in the mystery of truth it means that human
liberty also accepts the presence of Nothingness within the
ambit of its freedom. For freedom consists in transcending
Nothingness. For Heidegger, Nothingness seems to be some-
thing positive. It can perhaps be explained through the distinc-
tion between the brute thereness of being (das Setende) and the
conscious existence of the human being (das Sein), Between
these two classes of beings there is Being-as-such which is, as
it were, their relation of union. This type of in-between Being
is the meaning which man gives to brute being as he reflects
upon and uses it. Before man gives it meaning, the world of
beings is positive being, to be sure, but it is still undetermined
and chaotic. Without meaning it is not yet Being in the strict
sense of the word. One can, therefore, call the as yet meaning-
less world Nothingness. Man is born into this Nothingness and
he will return, via death, to this Nothingness. During his life
span, however, his courageous resolves of freedom enable him
to transcend this Nothingness. Through the exercise of his free-
dom he commits himself to accept the challenge of Nothing-
ness; he imposes meaning upon this Nothingness and thereby
raises it to the status of Being. Man attains mature achieve-
ments in truth and liberty when he organizes his existence in
a meaningful manner between the two Nothingnesses border-
ing his birth and death. Only thus can he live an authentic
existence. From this phenomenological doctrine arises Heideg-
ger’s famous formula: Ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit. “Every
being in so far as it is being is made out of nothing.”
Christian philosophy, of course, is in complete disagreement
with Heidegger’s formula. The Scholastic philosophy holds that
ex nihilo nihil fit, but this is in the context that defines Noth-
ing as the absolute absence of all being. But, since God always
exists, the Christian formulates his principle in a more realis-
tic way. Ex nihilo fit—ens creatum. He is forced by the evi-

6. Ibid., p. 377.
7. Ibid, p. 377.

262 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

dence of creation to conclude in this reasonable way. But since
God is Being in such an absolutely transcending and superior
way arid degree from the being of creatures, the Christian
divides being into Summum Ens—God—and ens creatum—
creatures. God is then seen as drawing creatures out of Noth-
ingness, but by the omnipotent power and fullness of His Own
Being. How this is done is the mystery of Being, because to be
able to grasp the how of creation would be equivalent to
comprehending exhaustively the essence of God, an impossible
achievement for a limited intelligence.

What then is Heidegger’s conclusion about philosophy as the
source of truth? He teaches that philosophy is autonomous as
a human activity. Philosophy cannot acknowledge any outside
authority, nor expect nor receive any support from natural
science or theology. The art of philosophizing alone, which is
the art of living in commitment to Being through the coura-
geous resolve of liberty, can discover and maintain the laws of
truth. To be sure, philosophy is not an enterprise of pure reason
apprehending eternal essences, as the Greeks and Scholastics
taught. Rather, philosophy is the historical act of the total man.
Only in piercing to the structure of man as he lives in history
does man succeed in comprehending what it means to say that
Being includes knowing, that man is to be understood in the last
analysis as a freedom founded in Being and Nothingness.

An Atheism of Ambiguity

On the basis of the first volume of his Time and Being (Sein
und Zeit)—the other two volumes of Heidegger’s philosophy
have not yet appeared though eagerly awaited for the past
thirty years—Heidegger’s thought has often been branded by
professional philosophers and theologians as an existentialist
form of modern atheism. In my opinion, there are very good
reasons for this conclusion, even though Heidegger himself in
his Letter On Humanism has vigorously protested against the
atheistic interpretation of his philosophy.*® It is true that he

8. Martin Heidegger, Letter On Humanism, from Philosophy In The Twen-
tiéth Century, ed. W. Barrett, H. D. Aiken, (New York: Random House, 1962),
p. 294. “Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as Being-in-the-
World, there is neither a positive nor a negative resolution of a possible Being-
towards-God.”

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 263

never explicitly denies the existence of God in forthright lan-
guage. But his whole phenomenological method of philosophiz-
ing and his descriptions of the human predicament inevitably
suggest that reality is nothing more than the existence of god-
less man in a godless universe.

A phenomenological method of philosophizing which forbids
the thinker from reflecting beyond the immediate, concrete
evidence at hand in his analysis of contingent existence must
Jead to a self-enclosed philosophic atheism. This type of philos-
ophy appears to be, if one may formulate an expression, a
phenomenological positivism. The very analysis Heidegger
makes of the inner, metaphysical structure of Being brings him
to the conclusion that Being is essentially and necessarily finite
and temporal. Naturally enough, if this conclusion is true, then
an infinitely Necessary Being who transcends time and change,
is simply ruled out, of no concern because it is non-existent.
One suspects that Heidegger sees this inevitable conclusion of
his thought.and it is for this reason that he has simply dropped
the question of God, proclaiming in rather Delphic terms that
he neither affirms nor denies God. He quickly affirms, however,
that his refusal to raise the question of God as an important and
agonizing problem for man must not be put down to indifferen-
tism. It is simply that on the level of existential analysis where
man is “thrown,” conscious and destined to death, the existence
of God cannot be raised as a problem. Why not? Heidegger’s
explanation deserves adequate consideration because it con-
tains a profound commentary on the contemporary chaos that
exists in the wasteland of mass society. Though agreeing with
him for the most part in his perceptive description of the
spiritual disintegration of our age, we cannot imitate either his
stoical stand of silence about God or his flight into the mysti-
cism of poetry as the only valid mood and response against the
triumph of technocratic society. For reasons to be exposed later
on, we consider both the mood of silence and the flight into
poetry sterile and misguided answers to the challenge of moral
and metaphysical chaos.

Heidegger, in a deeply spiritual sense, is a philosophic heir of
Nietzsche. In a series of conferences given during the Third
Reich, Heidegger expounded on Nietzsche’s saying: “God is
Dead.” He pointed out that this proclamation was the bell-sym-

264 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

bol that tolled the tragic end of Western man as a Christian.
The expression “God is dead” has undermined the whole vision
of an intelligible world that transcends the sensible world. It
has weakened not only Christian belief but the whole tradition
of Western metaphysics. Not satisfied with expounding this
saying of Nietzsche’s, Heidegger went on to reinterpret it. He
explained that when Nietzsche announced that “God is dead,”
the proclamation remained an anti-proclamation, that is, it
continued to be addicted to what it opposed. It continued to
arouse a world-wide upheaval of nostalgic emotions that de-
plored the absence and hungered for the return of the dead God.
Heidegger suggested that Nietzsche’s thrust against God ought
to be pushed to its limits. After all, even Nietzsche considered
the “Death of God” to be only a transitional event. Thus the
movement against God should so develop that no trace of the
emotional trail left behind should be allowed to remain to indi-
cate the direction or place in which God had quietly and unob-
trusively sunk into oblivion.? Once the old God, with his old
norms of transcendent truth, goodness and beauty had van-
ished, then the authority of the old God would be replaced by
the authority of liberated man, the new man, the man of reason
and committed conscience. Nietzsche’s atheism was a step in
the right direction; it was a nihilism leading to a greater self-
consciousness in man through which the essence of modern
man would come to fulfillment. Then, creative activity, no
longer the monopoly of a defunct God, would become the char-
acteristic activity of man. And just as Nietzsche called for the
“transvaluation of all values,” so too modern man’s new ethic
would no longer have fixed norms. The final step, of course,
would be achieved in man’s maturation when he ascended to
the position of being the executor of his absolute will to power.
Heidegger seemed to be teaching that God had to be annihilated
and every trace or memory of his Being erased from the con-
sciousness of man if man were to become authentic man.
For Heidegger, however, the modern age is still slightly sick-
ened with nostalgia for God. To be sure, it is an age of meta-
physical and theological rot. A whole spiritual movement that
impoverishes the spirit of man while it coddles his body and
titillates his superficial interests is in the ascendency at pre-
9. Georg Siegmund, God On Trial, pp. 433-434.

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 265

sent in politics, education, religion and the world of work. Tech-
nocracy has produced depersonalized individuals, stampeding
human herds, faceless nations, vast military blocks, all swal-
lowed up in the devitalized life of unauthentic existence. The
madman in Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom had predicted this
dreadful happening, man’s confrontation face to face with
Nothingness. “What are these churches now,” he cried out, “if
they are not the tombs and monuments of God?” Concerning
modern man’s attitude toward God and religion, Heidegger rec-
ords that, despite his nostalgia for God, man’s traditional be-
liefs have evanesced into thin air. Man has become so obsessed
with things—inventing, accumulating, consuming them—that
all gods, even the Christian God, have been driven from his
consciousness. Man has lost touch with the experience of the
“holy.” His everyday world is no longer sacred; rather it has
been vulgarized, secularized, desacralized. Thus despairing of
salvation for this fallen world from either the classic or Chris-
tian God, Heidegger turns toward the poet as the new savior.
And the poet who has inspired his vision and inflamed his soul
is his beloved J. C. F. Hélderlin who lived from 1770 to 1843 in
Germany.

Following the lead of Hélderlin, Heidegger placed the poet, as
the new priest and prophet, between the gods and the people.
“He is the one who has been cast out—out into that Between,

between gods and men. But only and for the first time in this
Between is it decided who is man and where he is settling his
existence.”!° Moreover, Heidegger fully accepts Hélderlin’s ob-
scure, prophetic witness for modern man. Its content and pro-
gram, in a world which has driven out the divine, is as follows:
“It is that Hölderlin . . . first determines a new time. This is the
time of the gods that have fled and the god that is coming. It
is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a
double Not: the No-more of the gods that fled and the Not-yet
of the god that is coming.” Heidegger tells us that his philoso-
phic attitude is one of expectant waiting for “the new god.” We
live in a new spiritual situation, in the time of “God’s fall.”
Heidegger, who broke with the Catholic Church and rejected

10. Martin Heidegger, Existence And Being, Essay “Hölderlin and the Es-
sence of Poetry,” p. 312.
11. Jbid., p. 313.

266 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Christ because he could not, even as a youth, convince himself
of the existence of God according to St. Thomas’s proofs, now
determines to live in the everpresent consciousness of “God’s
self-withholding.” The philosopher must join the poet in wait-
ing on mountains farthest apart for the coming of the “new
god” from the bosom of the word of Being-itself. For both Hild-
erlin and Heidegger this messianic expectancy is a secularized
form of the Judaeic yearning for the first coming and the Chris-
tian eagerness for the final coming of God. There is nothing
transcendent in a supernatural sense about their non-Christian
piety. Moreover, during this period of waiting, it would be
ridiculous to talk meaningfully about God and things divine.
For we live in an age of transition whose chief chaotic charac-
teristic is silence about God. Discussion about God today can
only produce distortion, falsehood, even blasphemy. All one can
do is silently, within himself, “call for the new God,” without
succeeding in making him appear, as no one has succeeded
hitherto.'* The hour has not yet come for the dialogue with the
new divine being, if it will ever come in our lifetime. And
Heidegger quotes his beloved poet, “the shepherd and guardian
of Being,” to demonstrate this truth:

Oft must we keep silent;

We lack holy names.

The heart may beat and break,
Yet speech remains unsaid.

But alas! our generation walks
in the night,
Dwells in hell, without the divine.*

Secularized Theology as Atheism

Despite Heidegger’s protestations that he is neither an athe-
ist nor a theist, the perceptive student of his thought comes
away from his works impressed with having encountered a
new type of modern thinker—the secularized theologian. We
notice that Heidegger says nothing explicitly about religious

12. Ibid., p. 192.
13. fbid., p. 261.

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 267

faith, eternity, immortality, the religious dimension of Being
and of man which is superior to natural conscience and meta-
physics. Heidegger places the highest achievement of man in
the attainment of authenticity which results from obedience to
the call of his conscience, a call from himself and hence an
obedience to himself. In Being and. Time Heidegger reduced
the meaning of human life to its temporal possibilities. Death
alone was the absolute which structured into wholeness the
individual’s existence. In the first phase of his thinking, there-
fore, Heidegger emphasized the man-in-the-world relationship
with other beings. There was, of course, no mention of a God-
man relationship. Then Heidegger abandoned his ontological
relationship because it remained too humanistic and did not
succeed in transcending metaphysics as he had hoped. Thus in
the second stage of his interpretative analysis of Being he at-
tempted to define man and the world on the basis of a definition
of Being itself. This procedure was the reverse of his first
phenomenological exploration. In the first exploration he at-
tempted to define Being through his analysis and clarification
of man’s understanding of Being. In his second study he placed
all the emphasis of his thinking on Being rather than on man.
This time he sought the meaning of Being not in everyday
world revelations of man’s experiences but in the writings of
the great philosophers and poets. Once again in the second
stage of his thinking the relationship between man and God or
between beings and God was not even raised for consideration.
Eventually Heidegger also had to abandon this second method
of his thinking as an acceptable criterion of the meaning of
Being. It contained untruth mixed with truth. In the third phase
of his thinking about the meaning of Being Heidegger selected
a few great figures for guidance who, in his words, “possessed
a more essential vision of being.” Thus having rejected man’s
everyday experience and the traditional philosophers as
sources of light on the nature of Being, Heidegger finally be-
came his own judge and authority ‘on who is a source of light
on the nature of Being. Without any objective criteria, he alone
determined who were the inspired authors, prophets and mys-
tics of Being. He ‘inserted their works as canonical in the Bible
of Being. It is in this third stage of his intellectual endeavors
that Heidegger becomes prophet and mystic of Being himself.

268 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Versényi has written an incisive analysis of this mystical
procedure:

In his attempt to make visible what is Wholly Other, and
to make enter into an entirely different dimension, Hei-
degger engages in a kind of negative theology and mysti-
cism: he gives forth sibylline utterances whose only
concrete content is the rejection of all human experience
and insight. This is not a sudden development, for already
in his second hermeneutic period Heidegger’s descent into
the poverty of thought was accompanied by a gradual
elimination of concrete significance and existential im-
port from his thought. But this process is now completed:
Insisting on the ineffability of his ultimate Ground, the
incomprehensibility of the Play of Being, and the total
otherness of his Region of disclosure, Heidegger has suc-
ceeded in overcoming humanistic metaphysics. But he did
so at the price of relinquishing all philosophically articu-
late and articulable meaning.'4

Once again among the mystics, prophets and poets who have
cast brilliant light on the meaning of Being in the course of
history, one looks in vain for a religious teacher or leader. The
revelations of Christ about the mystery of the Being of Beings
—the Divine Trinity—are nowhere mentioned. Heidegger the
philosopher proves to be an arbitrary selector of authors. More-
over, he is quite dogmatic about the fact that his choices, uncor-
roborated by others, are the best and should be accepted
unquestioningly by all. It is quite clear that Heidegger has cut
himself adrift from his Christian moorings. He teaches man-
kind in his mystical language that men must presently endure
in silence “the lean years,” awaiting the “poet” who keeps in
touch with the vanished gods. The “poet” will come eventually
and open the gates to the city of the “holy.” For the Christian
faith which he has relinquished, Heidegger has substituted a
secular faith in his select philosophers and poets. They are the
prophetic heralds, along with Heidegger himself, of the coming
Poet-God who will save mankind. This faith is mystical; it pro-
fesses no definite doctrines; it adheres to no clearly identifiable
God or gods; its highpriests—the shepherds and guardians of

14. Laszlo Versényi, Heidegger; Being; And Truth; (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, A Yale Paperbound, 1965), p. 163.

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 269

Being—are the mystic poéts, the prophet-philosophers, the
secularized theologians. Because secular philosophy had failed
to reveal to man the meaning of Being, or to guide him success-
fully through finitude, dread, guilt and fear of death to authen-
tic existence, Heidegger abandoned it for his mystical method
of procedure. Now his secularized theology is announced as the
only road to authentic existence, the gateway to the “gods” and
their empire of “holy ones.” In effect, Heidegger has become
the herald of a “New God,” the Isaiah of the Third and Final
Testament, announcing the advent of an unknown-unknowa-
ble God, the very purpose of whose mission to man is inscruta-
ble. And yet, despite this dark inscrutability, man is exhorted
to prepare a welcome for this “new God” in dumb silence.
Moreover, man’s relationship to this “new God” is left so vague,
so impersonal, so directionless that man is nonplused as to
what to expect and what to do in an authentic way during “this
time of need.”

We have already indicated Heidegger’s fascination for Nietz-
sche’s thrilling, anti-rational addiction to mighty but extreme
ideals. A religious loyalty to the earth, a lust for life as the
highest of values, a zeal for planning and achieving terrifying
experiences, the thirst for living dangerously, heroically, atop
mountains, apart from the crass crowd and yet the fierce temp-
tation to descend, shake the foundations of the trivial lives of
the masses and plunge them into the abyss of tragedy. Faith in
feeling, force, fate, indeed in Nothingness, all these ideals of
passion led Heidegger to choose deliberately, even violently, an
ontological order of ironclad immanentism in preference to
God and God’s providence of love in behalf of mankind. Lands-
berg characterizes the Hiedeggerian philosophy of fatalism as
a “paradoxical mystery of extreme cruelty.”'* Indeed, in scruti-
nizing Heidegger’s “New God” who is coming, one fears to dis-
cover that he is none other than Nietzsche’s approaching God
of Superman.

15. Dr. Goetz Briefs, professor with Heidegger at the University of Freiburg
in the.1920’s, related this incident to me in Rome where I consulted him on this
study. Dr. Heidegger was chagrined at the carefree lives of people who, like fish
swimming contentedly in the shallows, escaped danger by maintaining life
lines with the shore of security—God, religion, the Church, traditional institu-
tions. His mission was to cut those life lines, to liberate men for the dangers

of the depths, for the authentic experience of the darkness of tragédy. Truly a
Nietzschean mission!

270 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Dr. Hans Jonas, himself an outstanding pupil of Heidegger,

astonished at the sight of theologians attempting to justify
their faith through the philosophy of his master, warns them
of the utter disillusionment that awaits them as a result of this
sterile activity. The Heideggerian highway of thought is the

road back to pagan fatalism, to a deified cosmos:

... There is much secularized Christianity in Hiedegger’s
thought... the vocabulary of guilt and conscience and call
and voice and hearing and response and mission and shep-
herd and revelation and thanksgiving . . . If we first ask
how Heidegger came to adopt the Judaeo-Christian
vocabulary ... ke (Heidegger) might ...say that the Chris-
tian speech, and the disclosure of being laid down in it, are
via our tradition an integral part of fate to which our
thinking must respond, and therefore the language is
genuine as kis (Heidegger’s) thinking response to the task
as conditioned by history ... The theologian should resist
the attempt to treat his message as a matter of historic
fate... as part of a comprehensive becoming .. . as one
element among others in a tradition and as itself some-
thing divisible, assimilable in part and left in part, ready
for the pickings of the unbeliever . . . But as regards the
theologian—or should I rather say the believer—it seems
to me that the Christian, and therefore the Christian
theologian, must reject any such idea of fate and history
as extending to the status of his own mandate. For one
thing the Christian is said to be saved from the power of
fate... Second, that which saved him was, by the under-
standing of faith as distinct from the understanding of the
world, not an event of the world and thus not an event of
fate, nor destined ever to become fate or part of fate itself,
but an event invalidating all dicta of fate and overruling
the words which fate speaks to man, including the words
of self-unveiling being. Nor is it, thirdly, itself a mere
unveiling: the crucifixion ... was not in the first place an
event of language. Must I say this to Christian theolo-
gians? It seems so... The theologian cannot, if he keeps
faith with himself, accept any system of historical fate or
reason or eschatology as a frame to integrate his trust into
—be it Hegel’s or Comte’s or Marx’s or Spengler’s or Hei-
degger’s—for the simple reason that it is about “this
world”, ... and its truth at best the truth of this world
... The being whose fate Heidegger ponders is the quintes-
sence of this world, it is saeculum. Against this, theology
should guard the radical transcendence of its God, whose
voice comes not out of being but breaks into the kingdom

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 271

of being from without. My theological friends—don’t you
see what you are dealing with? Don’t you sense, if not see,
the profoundly pagan character of Heidegger’s thought?
Rightly pagan, insofar as it is philosophy, though not every
philosophy must be so devoid of objective norms; but more
pagan than others from your point of view, not in spite but
because of its, also, speaking of call and self-revealing and
even of the shepherd.’¢

The truth of the matter is that secularized theology cannot
make life worth living. Nor should the use of Christian categor-
ies applied in non-theological senses fool the forlorn reader.
When the center of all Being and, above all, of man’s being is
rejected, the flight into mystical neologisms will not save the
situation. Sooner or later the truth will out. Without God—Abso-
lute Intelligence, Liberty and Goodness—at the center of Being,
all beings fly off into directionless, meaningless chaos. St. Paul,
true mystic theologian, accurately enunciated the Christian
news of salvation. This news is the wisdom of God as revealed
in the Son of God made man. It is a wisdom radically opposed
to the wisdom of the philosophers and poets who refuse dia-
logue with God or the Son of God, the only God who can and has
wrought the salvation of man. “For, it is written, ‘I will destroy
the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent, I will
reject.’ Where is the ‘wise man’? Where is the scribe? Where is
the disputant of this world? Has not God turned to foolishness
the ‘wisdom’ of this world?” Thus, the good news of salvation
is not dependent upon the philosophers or poets of this world.

Heidegger exhorted men to face death honestly as a way to
authentic, existential salvation in this world, since there is no
other spiritual, transcendent world. But the courage to be, live
and die for Nothingness is irrational and breaks down into
despair and suicide. How can Heidegger counsel man to live
purely and simply for death in the name of his meaning of
authenticity? St. Paul, on the other hand, demonstrates that the
world is incapable of delivering man from the despair of death.
We cannot save ourselves, nor can philosophers or poets save
us. Moreover, we do not live solely in or for ourselves. “You are
not your own. You are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” We are

16. Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology”, Review of Metaphysics, XVIII,
December 1964, pp. 207-233, pp. 214, 215, 217, 218, 219.
17. I Corinthians 1 : 19-21.

272 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

delivered from despair and death solely in Jesus Christ, the Son
of God who has already come, already achieved our salvation
and left us abundant powerful means to bring this salvation to
the maturity of high, authentic sanctity. And we await the
same known God who is to return. Moreover, we await him, not
in silence, but in psalms, singing and.good works. No poet or
philosopher, however sublime, will ever replace the Son of God
as the Saviour of all men. For, “He is the image of the invisible
God, the firstborn of every creature. For in him were created all
things in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things
invisible. . .Al things have been created through him and unto
him, and he is before all creatures, and in him all things hold
together.”!8 “Why is there any Being at all—why not far rather
Nothing?” Heidegger had asked at the end of his inaugural
lecture, “What is Metaphysics?” when he was appointed to the
Chair of Philosophy in Freiburg as successor to his own mentor
Edmund Husserl. Unfortunately, Heidegger at that time was in
the position of another famous historical figure who had asked
the question: “What is truth?” Like Pilate he had turned away
from Christ and did not bother to find the answer in the Son of
God.

As a matter of fact, when we analyze the epistemology of
Heidegger, we find that he replaces eternal, transcendent truth
with truth as a social-historical, on-going reality. Truth thus
suffers the fate of all immanent realities; truth is essentially
relative. Heidegger contends that the assertion that the sun
revolves around the earth was not untrue before Copernicus
discovered that the earth revolves around the sun. Truth is thus
cut back exclusively to the subjective act of human knowledge
and depends only on what the universe reveals about itself
under present circumstances. What is presently believed as
true is truth. There is no transcendent, immutable Personifica-
tion of Truth Itself who can infallibly measure the truths ex-
pressed in history. Popular appeal and willpower make truth.
No wonder Nazism could be easily espoused as a fateful histori-
cal truth. It enjoyed vast power, historical success and massive
popularity. Truth in Heidegger is thus trendy, fickle, even con-
tradictory. A philosophy is true when its hour of success has
arrived; it ceases to be true when the hour of its contradictory

18. Colossians 1 : 15-17.

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” ' 273

system of thought has struck in the process of history. Thus,
already in his epistemology Heidegger had denied God who is
Absolute Truth, the Source and Standard of all cosmic, histori-
cal truth. And yet inconsistently though unavoidably, Heideg-
ger pays tribute to the reality of transcendent truth and
absolute moral goodness by claiming throughout his works that
his theory of truth is the only true theory and his standards of
moral goodness are the only standards of authentically human
conduct. And in making these claims Heidegger understands
truth and moral goodness in the classic, immutable, even Chris-
tian meaning of those terms.

As for man’s destiny to death, once again Heidegger’s doc-
trine is a summons to suicide, intellectual, moral and social.
This form of nihilism is no solution to the mystery of Being. St.
Paul, the theologian of the resurrection had long ago answered
Heidegger, the theologian of annihilation. “Behold, I tell you a
mystery: we shall all indeed rise. . .For this corruptible body
must put on incorruption, and this mortal body must put on
immortality. But when this mortal body puts on immortality,
then shall come to pass the word that is written: ‘Death is
swallowed up in victory!’ O Death, where is thy victory? O
Death, where is thy sting? ... But thanks be to God who has
given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ ... And the
last enemy to be destroyed will be death, for God has put all
things under his feet,”!® Instead of walking in futility of mind,
clouded in darkness, estranged from God and courageously
committed to death, the Christian accepts death with faith in
the risen Christ, hope for his homecoming to God and gratitude
for Christ’s common victory over death. Only such a divine
destiny to death can render life in time an adventure of self-
transcendence, for it is an adventure into the life of God.

Another glaring disservice of Heidegger’s night of nihilism is
that it proposes to man, isolated from God, an ethic which, like
that of Nietzsche, is beyond good and evil. The private, subjec-
tive conscience is made the sole source of morality. By coura-
geous decisions of freedom it is to make authentic existence its
goal in life, overcoming dread, mass mediocrity and death. But
such mere teaching and exhortation to moral rectitude is unin-
spiring and indeed sterile, if the obligation to that moral good-

19.. I Corinthians 15 : 53-55.

274 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ness is imposed solely by the private conscience which enjoys
a liberty restricted solely by itself, which is to say, an unre-
stricted liberty. We are reminded again of Ivan Karamazov’s
logical rule of morality: “If God did not exist, everything would
be permitted.” Thus Heidegger’s ethic is reduced to being to-
tally subjective, irresponsible, unrealistic and hence, ineffica-
cious for producing moral goodness. For a merely subjective
protest against the morality of the masses, when vastly out-
voted by the masses, has no higher recourse or appeal to a
Supreme Source of moral goodness and hence falls upon deaf
ears. It is quite understandable, then, that in the face of the vast
decadence of civilization effected by the tyranny of technoc-
racy, Heidegger, in the last analysis, can only confront the void
with the paralyzed stare of dread and the silence of despair. He
seems to have forgotten his earlier exhortations that the man
of historical authenticity must. keep vital experiences of the
past which can improve the present and prepare a better fu-
ture. The fact that for two thousand years mankind has kept
alive the life and deeds of Christ for the ineffable betterment
of the whole human race is passed over in total silence in his
philosophy, despite the fact that Christ has come to be looked
upon as the center and full meaning of all history. The fact that
twelve simple witnesses, in a world of Roman depravity far
worse than ours, instead of keeping silence, raised their voices
incessantly with the good news of divine salvation, seems
never to have dissuaded Heidegger from his advocacy of quiet-
ism in the face of nihilism. The fact that their “voice and words
which had gone forth into all the earth and unto the ends of the
world” had converted a world of slaves into a world of saints
is not even adverted to by Heidegger.

The lives of Christ, the apostles and of all men of true faith
alone give the full, true meaning of Being, finitude, throwness,
dread, care, crime, guilt, authentic existence and death. They
speak not only in words and deeds but also in blood and death.
And the meaning is love, Divine Love, incarnated in the Son of
God and communicated through His Spirit to all men. Why is
there being rather than nothing? Because He is love, because
He is good, I exist, everything exists, everyone exists. “Greater
love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his
friends.” It is a tragic pity that Heidegger, who knew Christ

Heidegger: Waiting for the New God.” 275

from his youth, did not in his phenomenological search for the
meaning of Being, apply his great powers of analysis and expo-
sition to the study of the existential commitment of Christ to
to God and his fellow men. Had he done so, he might have
spared himself the experience of the sickness of being which
arises from the meaninglessness of life.

In a world of confusion which he had hoped to improve, it is
‘especially catastrophic that his philosophy of nihilism merely
succeeds in cutting man’s breathing lines to the source of his
life in God and leaving him to suffocate in the vacuum of athe-
ism. For to deprive man of the atmosphere of God is to destroy
him via spiritual asphyxiation.

af

CHAPTER IX

|

14

DA
ie

Merleau-Ponty: Man, The God
of Meaning and Liberty

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY WAS BORN AT ROCHEFORT-
sur-mer (Charente-Maritime) on March 14, 1908. He was Catho-
lic in origin, well-informed about his faith and a solid Christian
as a youth. In 1926 he was admitted to the Ecole Normale Su-
perieure. After receiving his doctorate from the Sorbonne in
1945, he taught first at the University of Lyons and then at the
Sorbonne through the years 1949 to 1952. He was then nomi-
nated to the Chair of Philosophy at the Collége de France. His
acceptance lecture on that occasion was eventually published
under the title In Praise of Philosophy (Eloge de la philoso-
phie). In this work he revealed his thoughts on the nature and
tasks of philosophy, the place of God in philosophy, and the
personal as well as social functions of thinking and choosing
that man must assume if he is to give meaning to his own
existence, to the world and to history. Merleau-Ponty died at
Paris in an untimely and violent fashion at the height of his
powers on May 3, 1961.

Although he had long ceased being a philosophical theist,

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 277

Merleau-Ponty requested and received a religious burial ser-
vice, indicating thereby that before his death he had certainly
reopened the question of the possibility of religious belief and
man’s divine destiny. Since he situated himself within the au-
théntically designated existential, phenomenological current
of philosophy, it is not surprising that Merleau-Ponty’s thought
shows strong affinities to the thinking of J.-P. Sartre, M. Heideg-
ger and G. Marcel. But the principal influence upon Merleau-
Ponty’s thinking by far was E. Husserl, especially the Husserl
of the later period. Hegel was also a significant though less
dominant force upon his work. Through his phenomenological
method of analysis and reflection, Merleau-Ponty hoped to
transcend the ever-present dichotomies in philosophy, subject-
object, idealism-realism, contingent-absolute. He developed
and transformed Husserl’s phenomenology into a more con-
crete, realistic philosophy. His major work consisted in: first,
detailed analyses of the sciences of man; second, a study of
modern, classical rationalist philosophers; and third, an eluci-
dation of the fundamental structures of human existence based
upon man’s immediate experience of the world, others and
himself. His later works concentrated on aesthetics, political
philosophy and the philosophy of history. In this chapter we
will restrict ourselves for the most part to his study of man in
his immediate cosmic, personal and social existential relation-
ships.

Philosophy Without God

According to Merleau-Ponty, to be an authentic man means
to live fully in relation not to God, but to the world and others.
To be an authentic philosopher means to reflect on what is
concrete and existential—man, the world, their relationships—
not on theological absolutes—God and the history of the here-
after. True philosophy suppresses theology in favor of anthro-
pology or sociology. One recalls here the philosophic themes of
Feuerbach and Comte, to say nothing of the phenomenology of
Sartre. When these themes are sung, Merleau-Ponty is a mem-
ber of their chorus. Be that as it may, Merleau-Ponty notes that
today no one attempts to prove God’s existence with the classi-
cal arguments of the Scholastic giants, St. Anselm, St. Thomas
or Descartes. God’s existence is either assumed as proven or

278 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

those who deny it are branded as atheists. Moreover, in assess-
ing and answering the new philosophies, the theist can usually
find a breached wall through which the banished God can be or
has already been surreptiously re-introduced. But if one should
fail to find the crack in the wall of such God-denying philoso-
phies, then one disqualifies that system of thought with the
epithet—hopelessly atheistic!*

The trouble is, complains Merleau-Ponty, that too many crit-
ics of philosophic thought assume that every philosophy must
inevitably arrive at the existence of the Necessary Being, if
such a philosophy is to stand intrinsically intelligent and coher-
ent, while simultaneously being illuminative of all that is.
Often enough, then, a philosophy is defined negatively—for
example, as being atheistic. But a negative definition does not
present in a positive manner what philosophy really is. Mer-
leau-Ponty laments the fact that even the serene reflections of
de Lubac and Maritain presuppose that true philosophy must
affirm God, not dismiss and then replace him with a pseudo-
god. For no pseudo-god can support the omnipotent role of the
ultimate Being who holds all things together in harmony physi-
cally and intelligently. Maritain and de Lubac have demon-
strated that atheism destroys one God in order to enthrone
another and that anti-theism lives parasitically on the true God
by “an inverted act of faith.”

Certainly anti-theism exists, agrees Merleau-Ponty. One
need only recall the classic system of Nietzsche’s thought. But,
insists Merleau-Ponty, atheism and anti-theism are not philos-
ophies. They are inverted theologies; and theology is not phi-
losophy. Savants ought to cease trying to give the final, defini-
tive, omni-competent, omnipotent explanation of all beings by
appealing to the existence of a Necessary Being. It is this obses-
sive assumption that divides philosophers and theologians into
estranged camps of alienated, grieved wranglers. Is there no
other alternative to this sharp-horned dilemma between the-
ism and anthropothesim, between theology and “the apoca-
lypse of Wonderland”?? Merleau-Ponty thinks there is. That is
why he rejects both the affirmations of Christianity—the God-
become-man-humanism—and those of “the mystique of Super-

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eloge de la philosophie (Paris: Editions Galli-
mard, Paperback, 1960), p. 50.

2. Ibid, p. 51.

3. Ibid., p. 51.

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 279

man—the man-become-God, Promethean humanism. Philoso-
phy simply does not exist nor flourish in such an imaginary
realm of non-being. The true philosopher does not predict that
in the end all human contradictions shall be resolved, nor that
man, as a totally perfect being, will be the final fruit of the
cosmic process of history. Like everyone else he does not know
nor care to predict the future.

The true philosopher’s message is quite different from such
dogmatic predictions. He admits that the world has begun and
is in the process of development. How? Or why? He does not
know. He denies that man can predict his future by what has
happened in his past; he denies that the idea of a destiny is
inherent to things; he claims that this teaching about a destiny
is not an idea, but a sort of metaphysical dizziness, a philoso-
phic black-out. The true philosopher holds that man’s relation-
ships with nature are not fixed once and for all, for no man can
predict what freedom can accomplish nor imagine what hu-
man morals or relationships would develop in a civilization
that would no longer be haunted with competition and destitu-
tion. Thus, the true philosopher does not place his hope in any
destiny, not even in a favorable one. On the contrary, he puts
his hope in that which in man negates any destiny. The true
philosopher hopes in his contingericy and this negation is his
point of departure for philosophizing. Should such a philoso-
pher be called a humanist? No, says Merleau-Ponty, not if one
considers man as a universal principle that can explain every-
thing and substitute himself for everything. For nothing is ex-
plained through man, since man is not a force, but a feebleness
at the heart of reality. Man is not even one cosmological factor
among many others; he is a junction where cosmological fac-
tors are forever changing the meaning of himself and the
meaning of history.4

But man is also attracted to the contemplation of all other
natures as well as to the love of himself. His life and love reach
out to too many things, to be exact, to everything. Thus, he
cannot easily make himself the sole object of his own delight
so as to lay himself open to the charge of engaging in “human
chauvinism.” This very same ocean of being that eludes every
religion of humanity, also knocks the props out from under all

4. Ibid, pp. 52-53.
5. Ibid, p. 53..

280 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

theology. It is true that theology undeniably establishes the
contingency of all being. But it does this only by deriving that
contingency from the existence of the Necessary Being. Thus,
by resolving all problems, dilemmas, struggles harmoniously in
the Necessary Being, theology, in effect, rids man of all contin-
gency; it destroys philosophic wonderment. On the contrary,
philosophy awakens man to his own and the world’s existence;
it poses the problems connected with both these existences; it
drives man on, in an endless search, toward the solution of
these problems. But, unlike theology, it never cures man of his
curious searching, for it never finally solves the problem of
existence. De Lubac discusses an atheism that seeks to sup-
press the very problem that gives birth to God in the conscious-
ness of man. In reality, however, the philosopher knows this
problem so well that he attacks it at its very root, thereby plac-
ing it beyond solutions that would suffocate it. Ideas, like that
of the Necessary Being or of “eternal matter,” or of “total man”
appear quite dull and prosaic to the philosopher in comparison
with that upheaval of phenomena and continual birth of beings
taking place at every stage of a developing world. For it is this
storm of burgeoning being that the philosopher is absorbed in
describing. Placed in this dynamic perspective, religion is seen
as only one of the expressions of the central phenomenon of
existence, a non-authentic, non-philosophical experience.
Atheism, therefore, cannot bė a valid accusation against a sys-
tem of thought because, in reality, atheism is philosophy seen
through the eyes of a theologian. The theologian claims that
atheism displaces and destroys the sacred. But philosophy does
none of these things, because it is not concerned with God nor
the sacred. But with what is philosophy concerned and what
does it do? A careful look into Merleau-Ponty’s writings should
give us his answer to this important question.

Philosophy Condemns Man to Meaning

While Sartre takes his point of departure from Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty owes his existentialism in a special manner to
Husserl and his late concept of the “world of life” (Lebenswelt).
Merleau-Ponty philosophizes by using the analytic principles
of phenomenology. He is a master in their use, pushing them

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 281

to their subtlest ramifications. According to Merleau-Ponty,
philosophy spends itself in phenomenological analysis, de-
scription, reflection and synthesis. Despite its careful excava-
tions of lived experience, this philosophy gladly recognizes the
essential incompleteness of its work and also its own provisori-
ness. There is so much depth and width to being that the most
complete phenomenological scrutinies can never exhaust its
reality. We can clearly distinguish Sartre’s descriptive analyses
from those of Merleau-Ponty by noting that objectively and
thematically each author concentrates on a different aspect of
man’s existential mission in life. For Sartre, man is “con-
demned to liberty;” for Merleau-Ponty, man is “condemned to
meaning.” As an intellectualist of serene temperament, Mer-
leau-Ponty calmly denies God. He has a passion to understand
reality. Sartre, on the other hand, as a moralist’ of vigorous
temperament, violently denies God, often in a frenzied style.
He has a passion for action. Yet both agree in rejecting theology
for anthropology, metaphysics for phenomenology.® When we
find out the exact sense of Merleau-Ponty’s statement that man
is “condemned to meaning,” we will understand his philosophy
and his atheism.

According to Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher is a person who
seeks being with a hunger to see whatever reality is there to be
seen and to report the truth about it all. The trouble with think-
ers today is that they are no longer seekers; they are partisan
commentators; they return to traditional systems of thought
merely to defend them. Their convictions are founded less on
the values or truths discovered by their own seeking than on the
vices and errors they seem to discover in the thinkers they
reject. In reality, however, man is an incarnate “I think.” The
marvelous event about him is the emergence of his subjec-
tivity. Meaning, truth, value arise in the world only in and
through the awakening subjectivity of the human person. Now
man’s seeking extends over the whole field of concrete reality.
Moreover, man is set down into his own existence, into the
world solely through his body. It is because his body enjoys
concrete existence that it is indissoluble within and from the
concrete existence of the world. Philosophy, therefore, will

6. Jean Lacroix, The Meaning of Modern Atheism, transl. by Garret Barden,
S.J., (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), p. 45.

282 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

have to be understood as a search into the structural analysis
of man’s conduct in the world.’ The particular characteristic of
Merleau-Ponty’s thought lies in the fact that he begins this
search in the experience and contact with the world that takes
place prior to any thought about the world. Thus he contacts
and examines the world before any reflection about the world
begins and he then contrasts this original, pre-reflective experi-
ence of the world with man’s later, ordinary, elaborated refiec-
tions. Thus, for him, philosophic reflection has the task of
awakening the original, pre-reflective experience of the world.
It is precisely in reflection upon this non-reflective, pre-
predicative presence of the world to man that philosophy must
spend itself. All its affirmations will have to be derived from
such a presence and from reflections that seek to clarify that
presence. Now, the original and immediate unity with the
world is experienced only in perception, which becomes, there-
fore, the exclusive object of phenomenological analysis. In
more exact terms, the phenomenon, which is the object of phi-
losophic reflection, has two moments: First, the mystery of the
world as its foundation; second, the mystery of reason which
rests on that foundation. Because of these two mysteries, man
is simultaneously oriented outwardly and inwardly. He is, at
the same time, both an Ego in a body and a thinking subject,
present to, yet simultaneously absent from, the world. It is this
tension in man—interior-exterior, present-absent polarity—
that consitutes man’s ambiguity. This ambiguity does not en-
tirely express the imperfection of existence or of conscious-
ness, but it does constitute the real, unique essence of man’s
existence. Moreover, this bipolarity is found to be functioning
in a dialectical manner. But, whereas in Hegel there exists a
destructive, tripartite dialectic, Merleau-Ponty presents us
only with a bipartite dialectic, a reciprocal dialectic in which
there is realized the alternate predominance of one of the two
opposites.®

When the philosopher investigates the fundamental phe-
nomenon of existence and its double dynamic direction, he

7. Johannes Lotz, “Ateismo e Esistenzialismo,” article appearing in L’
Ateismo e Contemporaneo, Vol. 2, one section of which treats of “L’Ateismo in
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” (Torino, Italy: Societa Editrice Intérnazionale), pp.

321-329.
8. Ibid, pp. 321-329.

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 283

discovers that the core of this phenomenon is “incarnate mean-
ing.” Philosophy is, for this reason then, freely committed to
comprehend the meaning of the world and of history. It seeks
this meaning by retracing its steps to the most primitive ex-
periences in which this meaning began to be formed. But in this
quest for meaning, philosophy encounters irrational obstacles,
contradictions, sheer nonsense which, however, the philoso-
pher is in a position to reduce to a dialectic unity with meaning.
Merleau-Ponty’s investigations concentrate in a special man-
ner on the meaning of the world. He discovers that all things
form a true con-text, a weaving together (the Christian would
say a witnessing together) for one world. When, therefore, the
philosopher turns his mind toward discovering the meaning in
man-as-a-subject, he discovers the meaning of intersubjec-
tivity that prevails in reality and through which each person
orients himself as an open being toward a dynamic encounter
with the other through the acknowledgement of the other as a
person. This clearly reveals that man has the responsibility to
achieve the community.

Is there any explanation for the emergence of man’s marvel-
ous intersubjectivity? Merleau-Ponty considers the question it-
self and any answer to it pure nonsense. Explanations and
answers destroy the wonder of contingent freedom. Sciences
specialize in giving explanations. They try to reduce beings and
their happenings to their antecedents, to their causes. Now in
the domain of physical nature, where determinism is the uni-
versal law, explanation of forces, processes, actions and reac-
tions is certainly in order. But man, the subject, is clearly
beyond determinism; he cannot be explained. Any meaning we
might advance as his explanation already presupposes him as
a subject. The subject, therefore, who is acting in the first place
as presupposing all explanation, is himself inexplicable. Man
as subject is not determined by processes, forces, actions and
reactions. Not completely anyway. For man is contingent; he is
free.? Now the philosopher insists on maintaining the contin-
gent freedom of man in the world. For it is through contingent
freedom that man escapes the prison of necessitating pro-
cesses. Moreover, human contingency makes human life possi-

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, (Paris: Edi-
tions Gallimard, 1945), p. 413.

284 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ble; human contingency is the necessary milieu in which the
life of truth, value and history flourish. Thus, for Merleau-
Ponty, history is not a determined process. For free, contingent
man creates history, not the way he creates machines, follow-
ing faithfully the laws of physical forces and processes. Man
makes history through his free, contingent decisions. And
through his free, contingent decisions man makes himself.
These decisions create meaning for himself, his fellow man
and his world. Man, as a free, contingent being, therefore, is the
source of all meaning. He is “condemned to create meaning.”
That is why man is never “guaranteed.” He cannot hope in a
fixed fate, but only in his own ambiguous creation of himself
and his historical world. Those, therefore, who put blind faith
in the inevitable growth of progress with the passage of man-
kind from present to future are hopelessly deluding them-
selves, Stultification and even regression are well within man’s
possibilities today, even as they were realized in past dark ages.
We must never forget that man is not a force but a faiblesse in
the heart of physical nature. He is not even a cosmological
factor, but the cosmological center where all factors in the
world meet, take and change their meaning while becoming
on-going history.

Meaning arises, then, within the dialogue between man and
the world. And this meaning is characterized by man as his
truth and values. The world, isolated from the thinking subject,
has no meaning. Man, isolated from the world and his fellow
man, has no meaning. There is meaning only in a world-for-
man, made human by the history created by human subjects.
Within the subject-world communication and intersubjec-
tivity, truth and values incontrovertibly exist; there really is
the true and false, the good and evil. But, says Merleau-Ponty,
the verb zs here only has meaning if the knowing subject does
not postulate an absolute “in itself,” an absolute “for itself.”!°
Whoever insists on first searching for and finding the absolute
“for-itself-in-itself,” thereby renders the human life of truth
and values impossible. For, “metaphysical and moral con-
sciousness dies on contact with the absolute because conscious-
ness is itself—beyond the insipid world of habitually benumbed

10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et Non-sens (Paris: Les Editions Nagel,
1966), p. 167,

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 285

consciousnesses—the living link of the I with the I and of the
I with the Other.” !! Man’s involvement, through his body in the
world and his involvement with others through intersubjec-
tivity testifies unmistakably to the exercise of his liberty. It is
true that his liberty is limited; each individual always lives
hampered by situations that from time to time oppose and con-
trol him through social bonds. Man’s liberty is, therefore, free
to function only in a limited field of action. But to be restricted
by conditions does not obliterate liberty, because man is capa-
ble of escaping his situation. He can, despite his social restric-
tions, make decisions to act this way or that. Man’s destiny is
thus to be sought in his zeal to fulfill himself toward the
achievement of community. The ethical imperative drives him
toward that goal.

In his treatment of liberty, we find that Merleau-Ponty is
truly a philosopher of existentialism. He stresses that man’s
radical finiteness and contingency are bound up with his limi-
ted liberty. Contingency is defined as that causality which at a
certain moment made man the subject emerge and which
again at a certain moment will make him disappear. Merleau-
Ponty finds in contingency no indication of any reality that
transcends the world or man. Thus, contingent man is always
and totally oriented toward the earth alone. Man’s existence
does not move beyond the solidarity achieved in intra-cosmic
and intra-human relationship. For beyond the unique and ir-
reversible appearances of existence there exists nothing. For
that reason, man is fundamentally a metaphysical being; his
metaphysical consciousness has, as its unique quest, daily ex-
perience. It follows that religion is merely a substitute for
so-called positive humanism. Coherent philosophy is uncon-
cerned with religion, a useless activity chasing a non-existent
phantom. Coherent philosophy devotes itself to exploring the
depths of the structure of human behavior. In a word, coherent
philosophy plunges into the depths of man’s social conduct. It
unmasks as illusory every reality represented as existing
beyond man and the world. Coherent philosophy is not
ashamed to admit that the finitude of existence cannot be
structured on any absolute or solid foundation; it truthfully
admits that man’s finitude is completely bereft of any security.

11. Ibid., p. 167.

286 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Indeed, coherent philosophy points out that both history and
politics also lead man to this same truth. All existence, and
especially man’s, is totally relative and ambiguous; recourse to
absoluteness is a vain recourse to nothingness.

The Case Against God

The impossibility of accounting for a God-dependent man as
a contingent and free subject calls necessarily for the denial of
the absolute. Indeed, it demands that the very idea of God be
radically erased from the consciousness of man. God’s exis-
tence would obliterate man’s consciousness and render man’s
activities absurdly impossible. In the presence of a God of infi-
nite truth, beauty and goodness, man is reduced to the level of
an unemployed slave. His search for truth becomes unrealiza-
ble; his desire to create his own beauty is frustrated; his ideals
for attaining moral goodness through his own efforts are ren-
dered empty dreams. Indeed, in the presence of an omnipotent
and omniscient God, man’s liberty is destroyed.” On the other
hand, no sooner is the absolute norm, founded on God, aban-
doned, than human powers rightfully claim their cosmic field
for the vigorous development of their own projects. No sooner
is God dismissed, than man is liberated, eager to pledge himself
to the achievement of a perfection which the world has never
7 t known or suspected. Previously, with God fixing His gaze
upon him, man felt himself overwhelmed to the very roots of
his being. Under the scrutiny of God, he felt himself completely
stripped of his powers, especially of his liberty. The profound
and mysterious center of his being was an open book to that
infinite Look. Under it, he could never enjoy privacy; his most
ardent desires, his past, present, even future were totally
focused and tabulated by the eye of God. Indeed, the stare of
God so oppressed man that he experienced the shrinkage of his
being to the state of a mere visible object, something to be
handled, examined and used.** Thus, religion, in a special man-
ner, came to be regarded, under the glance of God, as a modifi-
cation of intra-human relationships. Religion taught man that
since his intra-human life in time would never develop to satis-

12, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et Non-sens, (Paris: Les Editions Nagel,
1966, edition of 1948), p. 356. P

13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et Non-sens, (Paris: Les Éditions Nagel,
edition of 1948), p. 362.

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 987

factory maturity, he should dream of the next life where he
would realize a deep, beatifying bond of social happiness with
his fellow men. The presence of God, therefore, put man in an
impossible position. No matter what circumstances man lived
under, God demanded that he lead two contradictory lives
simultaneously. He called man to strive for two orders of val-
ues at once—the human values of this life and the divine values
of the next. The fulfillment of these contradictory calls is sim-
ply impossible and thus man becomes a complete failure, nei-
ther a human nor a divine achievement.

All the same and despite the foregoing explanations against
God, Merleau-Ponty has always objected to having his thought
branded as atheistic. He admits that, in a way, philosophy is
unable to purge itself of the thought of God. “I think that it is
naturally inherent for man to think of God. This does not, how-
ever, mean that God exists.”"* Because the existence of God
destroys the wonderment inherent in true philosophy, Mer-
leau-Ponty'will have nothing to do with God in philosophy. Yet
he refuses to call himself an atheist, though he admits that he
does so only when he is provoked." Moreover, the fact that men
in general are preoccupied with God cannot be silenced by call-
ing it simply an illusion. Men think and talk about God uninter-
ruptedly and with implacable insistence. The novelty of
God-thinking, or thinking-God, never fades; it is always in-
fluencing human thought in precise and all-pervading ways. Its
very influence is revealed in Merleau-Ponty’s thought itself.
God, in the form of the Transcendent, haunts Merleau-Ponty
when he tries to make the transition from the mystery of the
world to the mystery of thought. He wonders how thought is
possible. And immediately he is in the presence of the problem
of transcendence. He has to consider carefully the conditions
that make thought possible. On making this consideration,
Merleau-Ponty declares that ordinary experience is a neces-
sary, but not an all-explanative, condition for thought. This is
his first step. But almost immediately another problem crops
up. Why does being hurl itself into the adventure of thinking?
How is thinking rendered possible from out of the most inti-

14. Merleau-Ponty, in a discourse given before The French Society of Philos-
ophy, September 23, 1946.

15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Deuxième entretien privé,” in La Connais-

sance de l'homme au XXe siècle, Rencontres interr.ationales de Genève, 1951,
p. 250.

288 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

mate foundations of being? To the extent. that Merleau-Ponty
concluded that ambiguity was the unique answer to the prob-
lem of thought, he did not get beyonda provisory solution to this
mystery. Merleau-Ponty was not able to complete his investiga-
tion in depth on the mystery of thought, nor to make secure his
provisory solution by establishing its validity on solid, meta-
physical foundations. Death overtook him while he was studi-
ously preparing a major work on this question. The first part of
this work and a large section of the working notes prepared for
future development were published posthumuously under the
title, Le Visible et lInvisible.

The Case Against Christianity

In addition to rejecting God, Merleau-Ponty also rejected
Christianity. He accused Catholic theology of doing away with
man’s contingency and freedom by deriving both from God, the
Necessary Being. By offering man this retreat from contin-
gency, Christianity betrayed man. For it prevented him from
courageously taking up his miission to give meaning to himself
and history. Through the temptation of its absolute God; Chris-
tianity stifled wonderment in man. For the man who has all the
answers to the adventure of human life ahead of time is bound
to be bored with existence. Christianity acts like the spoiler of
a mystery novel who reveals the ending to the prospective
reader, thereby prematurely sating his hunger for the quest
and goal of mystery, and removing the very motive for entering
upon the adventure. Merleau-Ponty finds the expression
“Christian existentialism” a contradiction in terms, Such a
philosophic stance is impossible in his eyes. True, there are
outstanding philosophers, like Kierkegaard and Marcel, who
are considered by their peers to be Christian existentialists.
But thinkers who put these two words together in a mean-
ingful way do not seem to see the illogicality of their posi-
tion. The Pope, Pius XII, was a far more consistent
thinker when he condemned existentialism as being contrary
to Christianity.

Merleau-Ponty tends to agree with Maritain when the latter
explains that the essence of Christianity demands the rejection
of graven images. As Maritain sees it, the saint is an “integral
atheist” vis à vis a God who would only guarantee the natural

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 289

order of things, sanction all good and evil, justify slavery, the
tears of infants and the agony of the innocent, all under the
rationalization that these hardships are, in reality, sacred
necessities for the fulfillment of the divine plan. Moreover, the
saint is an “integral atheist” before a God who would sacrifice
man to the cosmos so as to have it proclaimed everywhere and
to all that He is the absurd “Emperor of the World.” Maritain
contends, of course, that the Christian God could never ap-
prove, much less perform, such cruelties. For the Christian God
is the God who redeems the world and answers the prayers of
men. For his part, however, Merleau-Ponty contends that the
Christian God is unfortunately projected by the Catholic
Church, in word, deed and demand, as being just what the title
“Emperor of the World” implies. According to Merleau-Ponty,
the Catholic hierarchy uses terminology about the Christian
God that represents Him as the Despot of the World. He admits,
to be sure, that there are among Catholic theologians, espe-
cially among the avant-garde French and European group,
more mollifying, humane expressions that depict the nature
and conduct of a more humane Christian God. But the official
expressions emanating from the top, from Rome, still insist
that God is the Maker of the World and the manipulator of
men’s destinies. And, insists Merleau-Ponty, the contingency
and freedom of man as subject are simply incompatible with
the existence of Absolute Thought, Absolute Will, Absolute
Power—all identified in the Absolute Emperor of the World.?*
Christianity, therefore, destroys the human adventure to
achieve meaning on earth; it opposes a heaven of infinite power
to an earth of infinite prospects; it divorces a mythical history,
already consummated in God, from real history, heroically
evolving and branded with meaning through the ambiguous,
contingent, committed activities of man. The Christian has
reduced philosophic wonderment to an empty formula. He is
prematurely celebrating a victory already assured in history.
For his enemy, Satan and his kingdom of darkness, is already
vanquished. Indeed, the Emperor-God of the Christian is also
his Conqueror-God. It is a lesson gleaned from history that
eventually occultist thought shows its mark.”
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eloge de la philosophie, pp. 55-56.

17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “L'homme et l'adversité,” in La Connaissance
de l'homme au XXe siècle, Rencontres internationales de Genève, 1951, p. 74.

290 THE GODS OF ATHEISM
The Radical Ambiguity of Christianity

As he examined the essence of Christianity, Merleau-Ponty
found it wanting not only because of its metaphysical. am-
biguity but also because of its historical non-dependability. In
certain periods of history he found that Christianity worked
with man in his search for progress and meaning. In other
periods Christianity opposed man’s quest for values and truth.
Why this historical equivocity? Is Christianity an authentic
partner of man in his quest for social maturity or not? Many
learned Christians of the high. caliber of Père Daniélou argue
that in principle and substance Christianity is the best ally man
has in his earthly struggles for self-advancement. Its history of
civilizing, sanctifying service to man for two thousand years
presents unimpeachable evidence of this truth. Certainly, such
learned Christians are the first to admit that history also re-
veals that many Christians have betrayed man in his quest for
truth and values. But these traitors were not failures because
of Christian truth and morals but in spite of them. These his-
torical failures betrayed man in so far as they freely fell away
from the ideals of Christianity. The teachings and example of
Christ, the Founder of Christianity, cannot be held responsible
for these failures, any more than the treason of Judas can be
attributed to the goodness of his Divine Master. There are un-
fortunate incidents in the past of Christianity; there are unfor-
tunate incidents in the present of Christianity and the future
of Christianity will be afflicted with its failures as well. Chris-
tians ever remain free to face or flee the ideals of Christianity.
Neither God nor His Church will force Christians to be faithful
to themselves. Christians, from Popes to peasants, are pecca-
ble. It is because of human depravity that scandals arise, not
because of divine generosity. Indeed, perhaps the hardest test
of a Christian’s faith is the scandal he receives from his fellow
Christians. But Merleau-Ponty is not convinced by this distinc-
tion between the substantial goodness of Christianity and the
accidental evil of depraved Christians. Often, he complains,
the Christian “will plead guilty for the past and innocence in
regard to the future.”!* Merleau-Ponty’s objection against
Christianity goes deeper than the historically good or bad deeds

18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et Non-sens (Paris: edition of 1948), p. 353.

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 991

of Christians. He admits there have been saints and devils
among Christians. But he insists that Christianity, in the last
analysis, is incapable of siding with man because its ambiguity
is an essential sickness, a sick constitutional condition deeper
by far than any outward deeds. And he bases his complete dis-
trust of Christianity on his discovery of a doctrinal distinction
intrinsic to Christianity, the distinction between its “internal
God” and its “external God.”

Catholicism is hopelessly and fundamentally ambiguous be-
cause Catholics are called upon to believe in an internal and
external God. Catholics practice a “religion of the Father” and
a “religion of the Son.” Somehow the two are compatible to
Catholics; in reality, they are not, in the eyes of Merleau-Ponty.
“The kingdom of God is within you,” Catholics are taught. And
so they find God in their inner souls, for God is more intimate
to man than man is to himself.’ Thus God’s testimony to Him-
self in the interior souls is alone valuable. With God dwelling
within man, no external force may be used to coerce man to
faith. Now faith in a God who dwells within man is a faith
characterized by the dimensions of eternity and invincibility.
Thus experiencing himself eternally stablized in an unshaka-
ble faith placed in his indwelling God, the Christian dismisses
the temporal as of no significance. Even when the Christian
violates his own conscience, he falls morally, yet he believes he
creates nothing, for evil is an absence of being, of good. Sin, in
this conspectus, becomes unreal. But, and here is that startling
ambiguity again, the good also has no real significance for
the Christian. For the good which abides in man’s interior
spirit, ultimately abides in reality in God who is more intimate
to man than man is to himself. And, moreover, since God is
infinite goodness, man can neither produce nor offer God any
goodness of his own human volition. It follows, says Merleau-
Ponty, that there is no good that man can perform.”

Man, analyzed under the aspect of his faith in an eternal God,
sinks into the abyss of meaninglessness. His earthly destiny is
of no great importance. Naturally then, a sort of fatalistic res-
ignation paralyzes his will; he accepts whatever comes his way,

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Connaissance de l'homme au XXe siècle,
Rencontres internationales de Genéve, 1951, p 356.

20. Ibid., p. 356.

21. Ibid., p. 356.

292 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tragedy or happiness. “Thy will be done” is his motto in life.
And so the Christian isolates himself with God within his soul.
“We have not here a lasting city, but look for one which is to
come.” The Christian is thus always stargazing into eternity.
But in this very situation we again come face to face with that
Christian equivocity. For the Christian’s lot hereafter is also
dissolved into nothingness. Is not his God always adorable? “Let
us repose in him,” expresses a program of idleness for all eter-
nity. Thus faith in his indwelling God strips man of love for his
own life. Prostrate, paralyzed and denuded before his guest-
God, human history’ loses its meaning, coherence and reality
for the inert adorer. In the presence of his abiding God the
Christian sinks into the coma of quietism.? In the apt phrase
of Hegel, the Christian is asleep in “the reign of the Father.”2*

But when God enters history as the Incarnate Son, the Chris-
tian’s religion, or rather man’s religion, takes on an orientation
of truly perplexing obscurity. With the Incarnate appearance of
the Son of God in history, the Christian’s faith shifted from the
internal to the external God. Now he was called to the practice
of the “religion of the Son.” For his God has moved from the
interior of man’s soul to the exterior of man’s history. Whereas
before, God was a hidden God, dwelling in inaccessible light
and in the depths of souls, now God’s life is dated with a specific
time; His travels are localized in definite cities and towns; His
deeds and words are recorded in explicit, historical books and
even His very death and final destiny are recorded on exact
sites that have become historical, holy places of pilgrimage.
Because God entered the world in this manner, the Christian
finally came to see the world as a precious place that has to be
humanized and sanctified. History, too, has taken on great im-
portance in his eyes as the milieu in which God taught truth,
created values and achieved the salvation of the whole cosmos.

Moreover, God’s advent in the flesh seems to have indicated
that God the Father was not self-sufficient. He took up flesh, the
world and history in His Son as if it were necessary for Him to
complete His own perfection in this way. Were the assumption
of man and the world necessary for the fulfillment of the Fa-
ther? Was Hegel, after all, right in maintaining that God, in

22, Ibid, p. 356.
23. Ibid, p. 356 ff.

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 293

order to attain His full self-conscious identity, had to incarnate
Himself in the dialectical and evolving processes of man, the
world and history? Whatever the answer may be to this ques-
tion, Christians, following the Son’s example, no longer with-
draw from the world in order to live for God. Now, in imitation
of the Son of God, they are externally involved in the ambigu-
ous development of the world, of good and of evil. Now Chris-
tians, like their master Christ, represent within themselves the
contradictions of good and evil, truth and falsity, light and
darkness. This means, in the estimation of Merleau-Ponty, that
Christians are also “non-Christians.” They are at once light and
darkness, savory and insipid salt. Once again that ambiguity;
for when Christians defect from God, their religion, their
Church, they still remain Christians. Somehow they fall and do
not fall, run away and remain, receive sacraments of life and
remain spiritually dead, profess a faith of joy and live lives of
unhappiness.

Merleau-Ponty traces this oscillatory, maddening Christian
duplicity to the schism within the Catholic faith between the
“religion of the Father” on the one hand, and the “religion of
the Son” on the other. “The paradox of Christianity, especially
of Catholicism, consists in this—that the Catholic never clings
either to the internal or the external God, but always takes a
position that lies iz between those two possibilities.”** In other
words, between the religion of the Father and Son the Christian
is a middle-of-the-roader; he wants to practice both religions,
but can dedicate himself to neither entirely.

Merleau-Ponty finds this Catholic duplicity and ambiguity
illustrated in innumerable historical incidents. For example,
the Catholic will give his life for his faith, but only because he
is convinced he keeps his life in this manner. The Catholic
surrenders to the darkness of faith, but only because he is con-
vinced he is surrendering to the infinite light that is God. The
Catholic founds his beliefs on faith, yet he is told by his Church,
teaching infallibly, that one cannot be a Catholic who dis-
believes that a rational proof of the existence of God is possible.
The Catholic believes in God’s immanent presence within him-
self and the whole universe, yet he simultaneously maintains

24. Ibid., pp. 357-360.
95. Ibid., p. 360.

294 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

God’s utter transcendence beyond himself and the wholé uni-
verse. History is sacred and important for the Catholic, yet it
is secular and trivial also, for it is passing away. Everything is
possible for a Catholic in God, yet everything is already deter-
mined by Infinite Wisdom. When it comes to daily practices and
policies, the Catholic is progressist and integrist, revolutionary
and conservative, orthodox and heretic. The Church is some-
times with God against Caesar, at other times with Caesar
against God; she has sided alternately with the rich against the
poor and with the poor against the rich. In a word, claims Mer-
leau-Ponty, Christianity, expecially Catholicism, is hopelessly
and utterly unreliable because essentially equivocal. There-
fore, man who is dedicated to forging his own meaning, truth
and progressive history, through his own creative and free re-
sources, simply cannot count on the Catholic Church becoming
his steadfast ally in this great human enterprise. Whenever her
essentially ambiguous religious instincts, doctrines, liturgies
and policies happen to coincide with his great enterprise, man
can make use of Catholicism. But he must be on his guard, for
in the last analysis Christianity will betray the authenticity of
man’s life, thought, ideals and history. Events over the ages
have proven that Christianity leaves men nonplused even
when it is not abandoning them.

A Critical Appreciation

Here we will search out and reflect upon the source, the form
and the major arguments that sustain the atheism of Merleau-
Ponty. The tap root of his atheism draws its nourishment from
the rich, primitive soil of perception. The necessary return of
the philosopher to this pre-predicative, pre-reflective field of
human activity calls for his understanding of perception as
that originally structured human behavior which includes ev-
ery aspect of man’s pristine experience, stressing especially
the birth and growth of his consciousness. A more concrete
consideration of existential man is scarcely imaginable. This
type of philosophy concentrates on the incarnate I, the individ-
ual subject called forth into the world and endowed with a body
that vigorously propels him into dynamic contact with the
world and the community of things and men. Its phenomeno-

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 295

logical descriptions aim at unveiling the original, complex phe-
nomenon of conscious experience in the hope of drawing au-
thentic conclusions about what. lies under that experience at
the core of man’s being.

Now it is Merleau-Ponty’s contention that for a philosopher
to reflect at all in this area of the dawn of wonderment, he must
reject God. Why? Because, he continues, once the philosopher
accepts God as the key to the myestery of being, then both the
mystery and wonderment over the mystery vanish. Moreover,
the philosopher burdened with belief in God is also incapable
of experiencing the thrilling, agonizing contingency of his own
being and the dangerous ambiguity of his quest for historical
meaning as he creates an authentic human community. A God
who answers questions before they are asked and determines
solutions to problems before they arise, kills the awe of wonder-
ment, the thrill of contingency, the challenge of ambiguity. In
a word, belief in God violates the authenticity of human life,
belief in God renders authentic philosophy impossible. In at-
tempting to evaluate these arguments, we will examine in a
phenomenological way the experiences of wonderment and
contingency so as to see if God’s presence in the philosophic
quest of man for meaning, truth, value and historical commu-
nity really renders the whole human enterprise sterile and im-
possible.

What is wonder or wonderment? Bacon has written that
“wonder is the seed of knowledge.” A normal child, then, just
recently arrived in the world, with everything to learn, ought
to be an excellent human exemplification of the dawn and de-
velopment of wonder. And so, on observation, we find he is.
Wide-eyed in pre-reflective, spontaneous awe at the magnitude,
magnificence and munificence of the world of beings, the child-
discoverer thrusts himself violently forward, all sensory sys-
tems open, toward whatever moves, shines, is colored, vibrates
or comes within his reach or prowling range. Wonder in the
child’s overwhelming perceptions is seen as the exclamatory
opening and expanding exultation of the child’s attainment of
new and more beings. Marcel, with intuitive genius, sees, below
the depths of these breath-taking discoveries, a metaphysical
dimension to man, an ontological besoin d'être which, from the
core of man’s being, drives man into the ocean of being. Thus

296 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

wonderment testifies to the truth that man is essentially a be-
ing-with, that esse est co-esse, “to be is to-be-with.” The activity
of wonder is, then, the subject’s attempts at satisfying his meta-
physical hunger for greater participation in greater being.
Wonder is man’s first thrust into transcendence; it is man’s
eternal effort to quench his thirst for greater and better grades
of being. Looked at subjectively, then, wonderment is clearly
seen to be man’s metaphysical and physical advance in greater
participation of the being of other beings. To recall our child for
a moment, we notice that he is first lost in wonderment at the
presence of his parents. He is first drawn into, then upward in
being through the parental “cords of Adam,” through the bod-
ies, food, things, love and service of beings nearest and dearest
to him. Man’s ascent in being always begins through realities
that are nearest to him. For these first awaken his wonder,
whet his metaphysical appetite, attract his whole being toward
the plenitude of being. Looked at objectively, wonderment is
seen to be related to other beings to be attained. There is more
being and “I must participate in that greater being” is the un-
verbalized truth underlying the child’s quest in wonderment. In
reality, then, wonder is man’s response of Yes to the alluring
call of other beings’ Come, a call that vibrates with a thrill in
the awakening consciousness of man. Wonder is the spiritual,
gravitational plunge of lesser being toward fuller being, of
fuller being toward the plenitude of being. When a philosopher
of the genius of a Socrates or Plato or the neo-Socratic Marcel
asks himself what explains this metaphysical hunger that ex-
ists dynamically at the core of all being, he concludes that there
is implicit testimony in this universal phenomenon to the exis-
tence of the Plenitude of Being. He concludes that upon reflec-
tion on this concrete, universal experience of wonderment,
man must conclude to the existence of God, as the Plentitude
of Being. Contrary then to Merleau-Ponty’s thesis, God does not
destroy true philosophy by stifling wonder. The truth is that
God is the hidden foundation for all wonder, the invisible but
ever-present loadstone that attracts back to Himself the crea-
tion He called forth out of nothingness and sent on its mission
of self-maturation.

The weight of history testifies to the fact that it is ina Godless
civilization that wonderment vanishes and that men despair of

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 297

ever achieving truth, value or creative communities. It is in
Godless societies that men become bored, though surfeited
with the comforts of their marvelous machines, and slide to-
ward the seduction of social suicide. In reality, then, the initial
pre-reflective, pre-predicative perceptions of man, as a bril-
liant dawn of wonder, already implicitly testify to the rising
Sun of the Deity in the consciousness of awakening man, that
Deity who is drawing man to Himself through the very activity
of man’s wonderment. St. Augustine experienced this wonder
in his long, tortured quest for meaning and value. His observa-
tion about it has become one of the most inspiring insights of
universal appeal: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and
our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Wonder is now
seen as the awed, agonized restlessness, the insatiable hunger
of conscious man’s drive for the possession of God. Chesterton
pithily expressed the same truth when he wrote: “The world
will never starve for want of wonders but only for want of
wonder.” Contrary to Merleau-Ponty, God guarantees man’s
authentic life of philosophy for He is the goad and goal of man’s
wonder.

What is contingency? A clear understanding of this notion is
important, since traditional metaphysics argues from the con-
tingency of creatures to the existence of God as the Necessary
Being, whereas Merleau-Ponty argues from the same basis to
the denial of God as the Necessary Being.” As might be ex-
pected the word has different meanings for each current of
thought. In the traditional metaphysical sense, that being is
contingent which has not the ground or reason of its being
within itself. This means that no aspects of a contingent being,
neither its existence nor activities, can find their full meaning
within the being itself. Thus all creatures are contingent beings
because they depend for their beings and activities ultimately
on causes, reasons, agents outside themselves. Indeed, in the
last analysis,.all creatures are contingent because they depend
totally upon the absolutely self-explanatory, self-contained,
self-sufficient Being known as God.

Man’s very activity of wonderment, which we have just

26. William A. Luijpen, O.S.A., Phenomenology And Atheism (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1964), p. 308. Contains a fine chapter on Merleau-
Ponty, but the book is marred by the exaggeration of blaming atheism on
Christianity.

298 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

briefly analyzed, illustrates his basic contingency. In revealing
his hunger for more being, it demonstrates the inadequacy of
his own being, his dependence upon other beings for his self-
fulfillment, ultimately his need for God as the sole solution to
his contingency. The trouble with Merleau-Ponty’s understand-
ing of the notion of contingency is that it is an expression of an
anthropological, not of the metaphysical, sense of the word. For
Merleau-Ponty the contingency of man means that man “is not
necessitated by processes and forces.” In traditional metaphy-
sics that definition would define the freedom, not the contin-
gency of man. Of course, for traditional philosophy even man’s
freedom is contingent, for he is not the ground or full explana-
tion of his limited freedom. That ground and explanation lies
outside of man in Absolute Freedom who is God. But God, far
from imprisoning man within necessitating processes and
forces—Merleau-Ponty’s contention—actually endows man
with a participation in the liberty that comes down from Him-
self, the source of all freedom. It is God who creates man free
and thereby challenges him to use his freedom to discover
meaning, truth, values and community. The fact that God
knows the whole system of creation and all its intermediate
and final answers does not in the least diminish the free contin-
gency of man. Even if man begins with God as the final answer
and solution to all, he is left to work out the solutions to the
problems of his world and societies through the use of his intel-
ligence and freedom. And he must do this in fear and trem-
bling, for ultimate failure and tragedy are well within his
possibilities. The fact that man knows and accepts God in his
knowledge as his last end and goal does not dispense him from
the responsibility of earning that goal, nor from the danger of
failing in the quest for God. Man is free and morally obligated
to perform the good deeds and abstain from the bad deeds that
will assure him success in his moral struggles. He is free to do
evil and reject God, his fellow men, himself—as many men
have done in history. Because he is free and intelligent, man
suffers contingency in the very sense Merleau-Ponty wishes to
preserve it through denying God.

Thus we see that the contingency of limited freedom in man
has no other rational or metaphysical foundation than the
necessary existence of the absolutely Free God. Moreover, the

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 299

fact of God’s existence does not reduce man to an idle automa-
tion, for God is not going to do man’s work for him. If anything,
then, the existence of God known and accepted only heightens
the anguish of ambiguity. For once man realizes that God is the
Supreme Goal he must attain yet can irrevocably lose, only
then does he fully experience the crisis of his contingency.
Kierkegaard has related graphically how the presence of God
heightens the degree of dread in all man’s decisions. The pres-
ence of God flings man this challenge: Will you choose for or
against God? After all, God is transcendent and invisible. To
choose these intangibles seems to man to be throwing himself
into an unknown abyss; man recoils in dread from the chasm
of transcendence. Either way his choice involves the survival
or annihilation of his being. If Kierkegaard’s phenomenologi-
cal analysis does nothing else, it demonstrates in a powerful
manner the truth that God does not, during this life, obliterate
contingency; he sharpens and heightens man’s consciousness
of it by requiring of him decisions that determine his eternal
failure or success. In a very true sense, man’s destiny is in his
own hands; that is how God arranged matters when He made
man free. Christianity gives countless testimonies to this truth.
When the Son of God appeared as a child and was received in
the arms of Simeon, this holy man prophesied one drastic out-
come of God’s arrival in the flesh, an outcome that dramati-
cally illustrates the ambiguous contingency of man: “Behold,
this child is destined for the fall and for the rise of many in
Israel and for a sign that shall be contradicted.”*” Far from
leaving man with nothing to do because God is present and
accepted, Christianity reveals God as demanding more of
Christians to whom He has given more; Christ, by His coming
and the example of His service to the world, to His fellow men
and to God, challenges Christians to emulate His generosity.
We here summarize our response to the first part of Merleau-
Ponty’s objection to the existence of God; namely that God
would destroy true philosophy through his destruction of man’s
experience of wonderment, ambiguity and contingency. First,
we stress that the datum of original perception is an experience
which is not merely sensory, but one which contains meta-
physically constitutive elements that indicate man’s thrust to-
27. Luke 2 : 34.

300 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ward and grasp of the heart of Being itself, however implicitly.
The internal-external phenomenon of human consciousness
cannot be explained simply by human ambiguity, but must’ be
seen, in its deepest foundations, as the metaphysical drive of
man for union with the Plenitude of Being—God. Thus, the
unity of conscious being, through other beings, with divine Be-
ing is solved not by appealing to the ambiguity of the pure
univocity of being, but by having recourse to the ambiguity of
the univocity of the plurality of beings. God is Being in the
absolutely perfect degree; man and creatures are beings by
participation in being; they are beings by the grace of other
beings, by the grace of the Absolute. Hence they are limited,
contingent, ambiguous beings, that is, beings by analogy. We,
therefore, replace Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of contradictory
ambiguity which he places between the internal and external,
the one and the other, man and God, with the philosophy of the
analogy of being. This philosophy of the analogy of being alone
coherently accounts for the ambiguity of created beings and,
paradoxical as that may seem, for the unity of all beings among
themselves and with God. Above all, this metaphysical founda-
tion of the analogy of being explains why philosophy, contrary
to Merleau-Ponty’s demand, can never succeed in freeing itself
from the thought of God, but is, on the contrary, always forced
to come to terms with Him. At the same time, the analogy of
being also explains how philosophy’s inability to free itself
from the thought of God is already its first step toward pro-
claiming His existence.

Secondly, we maintain that the superhuman dimension of
man’s being should not be completely reduced to his intrahu-
man dimension. For the metaphysical is not the only aspect of
man’s being. Indeed man’s metaphysical consciousness tran-
scends the experience of the merely perceptible. Man’s meta-
physical consciousness reveals that there exist drives in man’s
nature which will not permit him to be held earth-bound, tied
solely to intracosmic or intrahuman relationships. These su-
perior drives reveal man’s need for religion and explain his
rejection of positive humanism as a substitute for religion.
Thirdly, phenomenology does not coincide with philosophy.
Phenomenological description of the exterior of beings needs
to be completed and surpassed by a return to the internal, tran-

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 301

scendental aspects of beings. Phenomenology does not supply
a basis for metaphysics; it is too subjective; each philosopher
claims truth from his own viewpoint. Metaphysics alone can
save phenomenology from falling into subjectivism. For meta-
physics alone affords the objective, transcendental foundation,
criteria and norms which can complete and stabilize the valid
findings of phenomenology. Fourthly, the “incarnate meaning”
which Merleau-Ponty seeks in the unity of the world and in the
human community, will, in our estimation, be solidly founded
and developed only and ultimately under the light and love of
the Transcendent Being, God. The Psalmist warns mankind
that “unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who
build it.” Moreover, history has testified, time and time again,
that self-sufficient man, after constructing impressive and vast
empires, only had them come crashing down to divide and de-
stroy men in the confusion of tongues and fratricidal wars.
Finally, we contend that an exclusively phenomenological de-
scription of contingency represents it as if it were a radical
finiteness, or a casuality so absolutely simple that there is of-
fered to man not the slightest hint of how to overcome it. In
reality, we know, under the light of the transcendence of being,
that all contingent existences are ultimately grounded in Being
and, in the last analysis, in the Absolute Being who can and will
cure all contingency.”2%

God and Christian Quietism

We now propose to answer Merleau-Ponty’s social arguments
against the existence of God. In an analogous formulation of
the same argument in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty claims that once
people are convinced they possess God, then, the human enter-
prise to create a more civilized world and meaningful history
becomes an absurd, impossible project. For in God everything
has already attained its perfection and man cannot improve on
that. From a Christian viewpoint, our first observation would
point out that the Apostles and first Christians would have been
startled indeed to learn that the coming of the Holy Spirit was
meant to confirm them in the idleness of waiting for the second
coming of Christ. So stirred were they by the Holy Spirit that

28. Johannes Lotz, op. cit, pp. 321-329.

302 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

they realized that, now that Christ had come, everything re-
mained to be done; there was a world to be divinized. And with
incredible energy they spread the truth of God’s entrance into
history all over the world. For the Christian even today, every-
thing depends on man’s cooperation with God. For each genera-
tion everything begins again; man has always the inspiring,
endless mission to humanize and sanctify society. Moreover,
from a philosophical point of view we can add that God, in His
infiniteness, does not possess within Himself what is human in
its finiteness, the human considered precisely as the finite hu-
man. Man’s self-realization through his own human activity is
never, as such, contained in God. God and the human person are
separate beings; man has to work for his perfection, not expect
it gratis from God. Man’s works, therefore, are far from absurd
or useless. Indeed, God depends on man’s loving activity for the
return of primitive creation back to Himself as a sanctified gift
from the community of man. God expects this gift because He
has already taken up the human family into His divine family
through the grace of His divine Son. Thus there need be no
contradiction between man’s orientation toward the world and
his orientation toward his Transcendent God. In fact there is no
contradiction between the “religion of the Father” and the
“religion of the Son.” They are one and the same religion.
“Philip, he who sees me sees the Father,” said Christ to His
apostle seeking a glimpse of the Father. The mission of the
Father and of the Son is identical. “God so loved the world that
he delivered up his Son for its salvation.”

The truth is that man does not live “always between one and
the other; he lives always zz one and the other”;”® he lives in
both, for both in God. As a matter of reality, Christians do take
this world seriously because “now is the time of salvation,” of
their testing, of their decisions for or against their God and
their eternal salvation. The Christian lives in two tensions; he
develops and realizes himself in his tension to create holy his-
tory and in his tension to bear away the kingdom of God with
violence; that is, with zealous love. The Christian, in his daily
strivings, can never be satisfied either with the degree of his

29. A. De Waelhens, Une philosophie de lambiguité, lexistentialisme de
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Louvain: 1951), p. 381.

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 303

success or with the efforts expended to attain it. Through suc-
cess or failure he presses forward, not looking behind but ahead
to the ideal presented him by Christ. Christianity and quietism
are, therefore, seen to be mutually negating. Indeed, the Catho-
lic Church is the only organized religion, to my knowledge, that
has solemnly condemned religious quietism. And her condem-
nation of quietism in religion could be reasonably expected to
extend to its use as a posture in every valid area of human
endeavor.

Merleau-Ponty also contends that the “look of God” violates
the liberty of man and reduces the human person to the status
of a mere thing. But Christ, the Son of God, testifies that God
is the Father of every man, the Father who bestows upon each
man whatever gifts he has of nature and grace. And among
man’s God-given gifts is the gift of liberty. It is God who de
facto created a universe in space and time as an almost limit-
less field for the exercise of man’s liberty. God is so sensitively
considerate of man’s liberty that He allows man almost infinite
spiritual space within which to make his decisions. Man is so
completely free in determining his own destiny that history
bears witness to the infinite range of his choices. At times, man
has risen to the supreme heights, through his free cooperation
with God, of ecstatic union with God; he has chosen to become
asaint. At other times, alas, by his decision to rebel, he has sunk
to the abysmal depths of monstruous criminality, even choos-
ing the ultimate, satanic crime of attempting to dethrone God.
“God is love,” says St. John the Evangelist. And we know from
the example of Christ that the regard, the look of God, the look
of divine love attracts, raises up, forgives, heals and expands
the liberty of the human person.

In another argument against God, Merleau-Ponty goes
beyond a position taken by Sartre, if that can be imagined. It
states that religion reduces man to the posture of being an idle
dreamer. He dreams about the next life. It is in that life that
man expects to enjoy perfect, intrahuman harmony, an ideal
wholly unrealizable in this life. The result of this fixation on
otherworldly community happiness is that the religious man is
antisocial. Christians are estranged from the community of
mankind; they cannot be fully counted on to dedicate them-

304 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

selves to projects that foster intercommunion and intercom-
munity advancement. What about this charge of social exclu-
sivism which leads to social divisiveness? First, it must be
stated—and the truth of this statement must be evident by this
time—that Merleau-Ponty either is not acquainted with true
Christianity or he continually characterizes it to suit his own
satisfaction and purposes. The last thing Christianity is, is ex-
clusive. Wherever man is, from hottentot to eskimo, her mis-
sionaries have found him. And even the charge that Christian-
ity seeks man exclusively for purposes of the next world will
not bear historical scrutiny. For nuns, brothers, priests, Chris-
tian laywomen and laymen have been doctors, nurses, teachers,
farmers as well as apostles of the gospel to the downtrodden of
the world. As for Merleau-Ponty’s definition of religion, we
must point out that he has failed to grasp the essence of reli-
gion. For the essential significance of religion is this: religion
is man’s community with God. This is true even of false reli-
gions in which men form communities and rituals in order to
honor their gods. But in the history of the Christian religion the
highest, most reasonable, most noble and sacred community of
man with God is realized. For in Christianity two communities
are united in sacred love. The divine community of the Trinity
has assumed the human community. Christ, God and Man, is
the link of eternal love between them; the Church is the prolon-
gation of Christ in time and the intrahuman bond that unites
men with each other and with God in a service of love.

St. Paul, writing to the Ephesians and comparing their social
lot before their conversion to Christ and insertion into His
Church to their present infinitely improved social state, illus-
trates what a pallid reality natural community is without the
transcendent ascent into the Divine Community of Love. He
writes:

And coming, he announced the good tidings of peace to you
who were afar off and of peace to those who were near,
because through him we both have access in one Spirit to
the Father. Therefore, you are now no longer strangers
and foreigners, but you are citizens with the saints and
members of Gad’s household; you are built upon the foun-
dations of the apostles and prophets with Christ himself as
the chief cornerstone. In him the whole structure is

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 305

closely fitted together and grows into a temple holy in the
Lord; in him you are being built together into a dwelling
place for God in the Spirit.?°

It is to this sublime, intrahuman, divine community that Chris-
tianity invites all men.

In another objection, Merleau-Ponty pointed out to Chris-
tians that they were attempting to live two contradictory lives
at the same time and under two standards of morality. We
agree that there would be an undeniable contradiction in the
conduct of Christians if these two lives and moral standards
were completely contrary or in absolute opposition. As a matter
of fact, however, no such contradiction exists because both
lives and standards either intersect or the higher includes and
completes the lower. As man develops in the context of his
earthly existence, his life presents him with moral values that
are essentially and indelibily rough, valid approximations of
the sublime values found in the life of Transcendence. Natural
moral goodness is completed and transfigured by religious
sanctity; natural moral evil is an irrational debasement and
can develop into religious dereliction. The life and values of
Transcendence constitute the intimate core of moral nobility
without which the natural life could not maintain even its nor-
mal, moral quality. There is no contradiction between natural
and supernatural life or morals; they both ascend toward the
perfection of God. Between the life of the wicked and that of
the just there is the opposition of moral war, but that hostility
is not due to God; itis due to the wicked who, in warring against
God, destroy themselves.

Conclusion

Before we conclude this chapter we want to consider briefly
the ethical dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. For him, as
for traditional. philosophers, liberty is inherent in every moral
act. Man’s liberty is, of course, limited by his limited opening
to being and, hence, by his created nature or essence. Neverthe-
less, men possess true liberty, even if it is also restricted and
conditioned by historical circumstances. Merleau-Ponty

30. Ephesians 2 : 17-22.

306 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

stresses that true morality consists in man’s authentic search
for genuine harmony within himself and with others within
the community. Morality eschews, therefore, any utopian ac-
cord founded on unreal and sterile ideologies which only halt
man’s search for valid harmony by presupposing that the whole
problem is already solved. The Christian Absolute, God, and the
communist Absolute, History, are cases of unreal ideologies
and phantom harmonies. For Merleau-Ponty, the moral imper-
ative is linked up again to human liberty, not to God or History
or anything outside man himself. Moreover, man’s liberty
should take as its commitment the good of the community.
Man’s decision to abandon God is a positive moral commitment
to assume his daily responsibilities with all his heart. This com-
mitment seeks no external guarantee for the attainment of
human truth and values. Rather, it stresses that man is deter-
mined to forge his own destiny freely. Merleau-Ponty’s thought
on human morality comes down to being a positive, a-religious
humanism. Now we recognize in this morality, without the
slightest doubt, a very high goal of moral goodness. The interior
self-realization of man which subordinates his personal career
to the good of the community is truly admirable. However, the
individual’s subordination to so social a goal is fraught with
danger precisely because Merleau Ponty has severed the per-
son’s transcendent bond with God. Godless, socially oriented
man, once exclusively immersed within the community, is
easily reduced to becoming the object of abuse. Our era is con-
tinuing to witness the frightful evidence of totalitarian sys-
tems pulverizing man with techniques of degradation for the
social good of the community.

Thus, we must say that it is not true that “the metaphysical
and moral conscience dies when it comes into contact with the
Absolute.” Rather, the opposite is true; the moral conscience
dies when it breaks contact with the Absolute. The truth is that
man is powerless for truth, goodness or the liberty of justice
and ordered love when he abandons God. He then becomes
powerful in crime, as history implacably testifies. On the other
hand, religious humanism, or rather Christian humanity, al-
lows man to escape the despair of social tyranny by inspiring
him to transcend toward the Principle of Liberty. Christianity
exalts man in his most intimate interior, holding him higher

Merleau-Ponty: Man The God of Meaning and Liberty 307

than the community, more precious than the temporal and
placing his destiny beyond the passing community of history in
the eternally established community of God himself. Only by
taking membership in the transcendent community of God can
man escape individualistic self-confinement in autoerotic hu-
manism. In the last analysis, it is man’s religious relationship
with the community of God which confers on the love and
services he renders to the community of men their most sane
and sacred significance. Man is not condemned to make his
own relative meaning and ambiguous morals; rather he is
called by God to achieve absolute meaning and to create, within
the drama of meaning, a community growing in truth, advanc-
ing in moral excellence and forging its ultimate transfigura-
tion in God.

CHAPTER X

id

Bonhoeffer:

The God of the Saeculum

WITHIN THE LAST TWO DECADES THE CRUST OF MAN’S
theological landscape has trembled and split wide open as a
result of the volcanic forces that have exploded beneath it. For
the Christian savant who has carefully followed the formation
and development of the various layers of modern thought, this
shaking of religious foundations was not unexpected. Indeed, it
was long overdue. Underground pressures had been building
against the city of theology for at least three centuries. In the
previous chapters of this work we have briefly studied how the
fault of philosophical and cultural atheism was formed. The
city of theology was perched precariously over the develop-
ment of this rockless fault. Eventually, when the pressures
below could no longer be contained, the quake struck, a large
section of the Christian city broke with a roar from the strata
of orthodoxy and shifted suddenly downward into a “death-of-
God” depression. This abrupt dislocation in the rock of dogma
sent shock waves traveling with restless violence to the ends of

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 309

the world of religion. Seismographic recordings in scholarly
journals reported the magnitude of spiritual desolation caused
by this crack in the Christian Citadel. A tidal wave of books,
articles, reviews, seminars and international conferences
inundated campuses and cities of the West, all of them obsessed
with the new gospel about the death of God. For the benefit of
the masses, popular weekly journals and radio-television docu-
mentaries sensationalized the news that Christian faith in the
God of Revelation was crumbling everywhere.

What has been the result of this quake of faith? The list of
casualties is appalling but we indicate here only the most dire
disasters. Among theologians, credal continuity and coherence
has been radically ruptured. In a sterile and self-contradictory
venture the Godless theologians have substituted the suicidal
science of a theology without God for the authentic discipline
of theology about God. As irrationally might astronomers pur-
sue an astronomy without stars or physicists a physics without
atoms or biologists a biology without cells. Then too among the
moralists chaos has supplanted consensus on what constitutes
Christian morality. Moreover, the Secular City is now rising
over the ruins of the Christian City. This new city promises its
citizens an earthly paradise and a civilization that is founded
on its new creed expressed in the following words: “There is no
God! In man ‘come of age’ we trust!” Needless to say, this God-
less City is doomed to even greater destruction than that which
struck faithless cities before it. For the Godless City is built on
the sands of a double fault—that of philosophical atheism and,
now, of theological nihilism. When the underground, volcanic
fires of disbelief, desperation and despair build to the point of
violent friction that can no longer be suppressed, then the shin-
ing City of Godless, secular culture will explode and be con-
sumed by fire like Sodom and Gomorrah and, like them, will
disappear into the bowels of the earth as a City of Eternal
Night.

But perhaps if Christians understood the past and present
causes that are hastening Godless society toward self-annihila-
tion, they might once again so bestir themselves as to change
the face of the earth through a renewal of Pentecostal faith and
zeal that God would be moved to spare and bless his cities. For,
unlike cosmic earthquakes, which are determined by necessary

310 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

physical laws and cannot be avoided, social upheavals do not
occur in such a fatalistic manner; man chooses these freely
with open eyes, often in defiance of God’s offers to save man
from himself. Man need only return to God in faith and repent-
ence to be rescued from social suicide. With the hope of spark-
ing just such a return, we will now briefly survey the remote
and proximate causes for the rise of radical theology.

Old Seed For Radical Theology

Despite some decisive differences among the radical theolo-
gians—we will consider these later in other chapters—their
death-of-God Credo sprang from a common ancestry. The plant
of modern atheism took root in the seed bed of the Enlighten-
ment. In those times the currents of thought were so wild and
the floods of passion so violent that the rich soil of metaphysics
and faith was swept into cultural oblivion. The body of God has
not yet been recovered from that flood, which is called in the
history books, “the Age of Enlightenment” or “the Age of the
Metaphysical Revolt.” Earlier, at the time of the Protestant
Reformation, Luther had radically altered the concept of the
nature of the Christian God. In his eyes God was the supreme
Being of absolute sovereignty who decided the fate of men in
a purely arbitrary manner, saving those He liked, damning
those He disliked, always, of course, for reasons founded on His
infinite holiness and goodness. Calvin hardened this cruel
brand of predestination into a ruthless dogma of faith. Natu-
rally, men shrank from this God who devoured their intellec-
tual, volitional and personal existences. In the name of human
freedom and dignity, the men of the Enlightenment turned
against this despot-God who, as the exemplar of human rulers,
was invoked to justify the unbridled political omnipotence of
tyrannical princes and kings. If man hoped to regain his free-
dom and dignity, he had to bring down his political overlords.
But, if he was to succeed in this revolution, man had first to
overthrow the Lord of his overlords Himself. It was the Chris-
tian God who supposedly guaranteed the authority and despot-
ism of Christian kings. Thus the metaphysical revolution had
to precede the political upheaval and it had to be, by the nature
of things, an assault against God and religion.

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 311

Rousseau created the euphoric atmosphere that fostered
man’s complete confidence in his own natural goodness and
faith in the power of his reason. Robespierre, his devoted dis-
ciple, promulgated his master’s doctrines and, in a famous
speech of the 18th Floreal (May 7, 1794), from the tribunal of
the Revolutionary Convention, decreed formally that the reli-
gion of civil humanity delineated in Emile was henceforth the
state religion. According to Engels this establishment of a civil
religion was the herald that announced that “the long hiberna-
tion of the Christian Middle Ages was over” and a new awaken-
ing, a new spring had arrived. In the exhilarating atmosphere
of this new spring, all philosophical problems were going to be
reassessed. D’Holbach in his writings at this time insisted that
“the God who was on trial was the God of the Christians.”! And
He was being tried for His ill use of omnipotent power as well
as for His abuse of man’s trust in his Providence. D’Holbach
thundered against God as the tyrant who had to be done away
with. Much ahead of Marx he cited religion as a drug, writing
that “religion is the art of inspiring mankind with enthusiasm.
It is designed by those who govern to divert men’s minds from
the evils with which they are overwhelmed.”? Voltaire himself
had no use for God, heaping ridicule upon Him and the Catholic
Church, But he urged the use of God and religion as a means of
preventing the “vile mob” from awakening to injustice, for fear
that the masses would violently disposses the affluent landown-
ers. God and religious faith were to keep the mobs from think-
ing, for once they begin to think, everything is lost. The illusion
of God would preserve the established order and prevent
anarchy. Marx shrewdly remarked “that Voltaire taught athe-
ism in his text and faith in his footnotes, and that the people
believed the text, not the footnotes.”* Though in the end he
returned and died in the Catholic faith, Voltaire left behind a
nation of agnostics whose faith he had sapped by the ridicule
and mockery that filled his brilliant books. Voltaire altered the
tyrant-God of Luther and Calvin into the deistic God of the
Enlightenment. This was a God who abandoned the world to

1. P. Hazard, European Thought In The Eighteenth Century (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1954), p. 46.

2. P. T. d'Holbach, Christianity Unveiled, translated by Robertson and Go-

wan (New York: Columbian Press, 1795), p. 229.
3. G. Siegmund, God On Trial (New York: Desclée Co, 1967), Quoted on p. 149.

312 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the devil, caring not at all for the miserable plight of humanity.
Men rose against a God who had betrayed this world, demand-
ing His annihilation. When the political Revolution, the Reign
of Blood and the Napoleonic Wars added their vast carnage to
this flood of free-thinking, the faith of France, eldest daughter
of the Church, was almost obliterated.

Soon many German scholars, ardent admirers of such French
men of letters as Diderot, d’Alembert, d’Holbach, Helvétius and
Voltaire, joined the chorus of enlightened mockers. Hegel,
Fichte, Feuerbach, Marx slashed with the pack at the Christian
God and Church. They sought the revolutionary change of the
existing order. But first the pillars of the Christian building had
to be leveled. That meant that God and the Christian religion
had to be destroyed. Feuerbach was acclaimed by the Neo-
Hegelians of the left for having skillfully liquidated the Chris-
tian God. It was truly a feat of dialectical dexterity and
consisted in the reversing of a Christian principle: God was the
image of man, not man the image of God. Theology was anthro-
pology not vice versa. Since this was the truth, it was time man
dismissed God and lived up to his own image. Marx, the atheist
of action, set to work reducing the Christian world to a desert
swept clean of Christian institutions. His classless utopia could
be built only on the ruins of the City of God.

With the arrival of Kant, a reaction set in against the illusion
that Reason was supreme and omnicompetent. Originally a
rationalist and man of the Enlightenment, Kant was shocked
from his dogmatic slumber by the criticisms of the English
empiricist, David Hume. Hume’s empiricism made a skeptic of
Kant, at least with respect to those “transcendental illusions”
that Kant analyzed and found metaphysically wanting—the
existence of God, the immortality of the soul and the liberty of
man. Kant demonstrated that the idea of God was impossible
for man. God’s existence was incapable of metaphysical proof,
even though God had to be cherished as a moral imperative of
the human heart. At this point positivism replaced rationalism
as the fashionable manner of thought in the twentieth century.
For it was agréed by all that Kant had completely destroyed any
objective knowledge of God. Thereupon the Enlightenment’s
superb collection of proofs for the existence of God—an exer-
cise never intended to foster faith but to flatter the enlightened

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 313

—was thrown into the discard. Granted that all suprasensible
realities were actually unknowable, scientism réduced man’s
knowledge to the mere experience of phenomena. Soon it be-
came a truism that a God who was unknowable was actually
nonexistent.

Following in the footsteps of the philosopher Kant came the
theologian Hegel. He planned to create a philosophy that would
end forever the eternal antagonism between reason and faith.
He started with a terrible resentment against Christianity be-
cause it tortured him with a sense of sin and paralyzed the
powers of his soul. The doctrine of punishment in hell for the
evil-doer pushed Hegel’s resentment against the Christian God
to pathogenic proportions. This led him to reject all faith in a
personal God. Nietzsche later is to hold this against God, that
God keeps man forever frightened and sick so that man will
always be dependent on divine medications. Both men accused
the Christian God of being the cause of man’s sick, alienated
conscience. Both rejected the God of Christianity as the eternal
enemy of man. In an effort to gain man absolute freedom, Hegel
reduced the tri-personal Godhead to pure, boundless reason, to
an immanent, impersonal Idea of the infinite, seeking self-
achievement in nature and history. God and immortality were
to be sought, not beyond or outside of man but within man, for
man is fatalistically destined to the achievement of the reli-
gion of absolute freedom. In his thought Hegel succeeds in
downgrading God to a mere dialectical “process.” Clashing,
twisting and unwinding in history, Hegel’s God of Process suc-
ceeds in obliterating in Himself all metaphysical oppositions
by incorporating the principle of contradiction.

Hegel reduced absolute transcendence to absolute imma-
nence, eternity to time. Under his intellectual ministrations
the finite became the infinite in the World Spirit whose devel-
opment was locked in history. In effect, the infinite disap-
peared, for the only reality in history or existence is the closed
circle of Abstract Thought fashioning itself as its own World-
in-itself. Starting from the position of attaining man’s absolute
freedom, Hegel ended by telling man that his glory consisted in
allowing himself to be kneaded into this collective, historical,
necessary process of self-achieving Thought. The Christian
longing for a transcendent happiness with God beyond time

314 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

was now described by Hegel as sentimental dreaming, a despic-
able flight from the challenges of time, a cowardly fear of the
good earth. It is from this very doctrine that Nietzsche’s hatred
of the Christian God will arise. Bitterly will he cry out a warn-
ing to man, a warning that is still echoing and reechoing in.our
day. “Brothers, remain true to the earth! Beward of the siren-
God of Christianity who would seduce you from your earthly
greatness!” This God is the cause of the interior disorder in
man’s unhappy self-consciousness. Already in Hegel we find
allusions that God must die if man is to be cured. These allu-
sions to the death of God in Hegel’s works become announce-
ments of God’s actual demise in the works of Nietzsche. For
both men, when man succeeds in finally identifying himself
with God, the old God will die. Indeed the whole death-of-God
movement takes its rise in this titanic adventure—the philoso-
phic assault of man on heaven in order to recover for himself
the treasures he squandered on God. Summing up Hegel’s deci-
sion to revolt against the personal God of Christianity, Sieg-
mund clearly follows that road of revolt to the dead-end of
deicide.

As we have seen, Hegel’s intellectual revolution began
with the fundamental religious decision he made against
a personal God. The principle of dialectics made possible
the suspension of Christian faith (instead of the radical
denial of God which logically follows) by positing the phi-
losophy of a World Spirit coming into its own in the world
process; God is not simply cancelled, he is “only” radically
reinterpreted. No longer is there a God who transcends
time and space, all becoming and all sin; no absolute, di-
vine opposite for man awakened to himself as a person.
God is identical with the world. Never complete, he is
forever in the process of becoming. Only at the completion
of the world process will absolute thought (das absolute
Denken) have come entirely into its own. The dialectic
between finite and infinite is annulled. Noetically and on-
tically God and man are posited as one; human thought
becomes the stage for infinite thought; only in man does
the absolute attain self-consciousness. God and man are
one and the same since God “is” God only to the extent that
he attains consciousness of himself in man.

A further consequence of this oneness of God and man
is that the world’s becoming is identified with the self-

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 315

becoming of the absolute spirit. Thus the infinite Creator
becomes finite, while the creature is divinized. Titan-fash-
ion, says Erich Przywara, Hegel with his identity of oppo-
sites usurps.the very ground of God by laying hands on the
inner rhythm of divine life.4

New Seed For Radical Theology

Now the idea of God, which was rendered impossible by the
Kantian dichotomy between the cognoscible phenomena and
the unknowable noumena, became for a new brand of modern
positivism a useless idea. A form of linguistic positivism claims
that all philosophical problems are problems of language. It
denies all meaning to any proposition that does not arise from
experience or cannot be verified by scientific proof. Now God,
ex hypothesi, cannot be concretely experienced nor become an
object of scientific investigation. Hence he is to be considered
as nonexistent, as of no account in the world of human reali-
ties. More recently, the neo-positivism called structuralism, .
presently the fashionable rage in the intellectual circles of
Europe, has taken to explaining the diversified manifestations
of human reality from the viewpoint that all interhuman rela-
tions are held together merely by their constituent, crisscross-
ing, discontinuous elements. There is no need to seek a
transcendent reality behind these human relationships which
gives them meaning, unity, a temporal and eternal goal. In-
deed, structuralism insists that the whole movement of history
is discontinuous. It follows, therefore, that God as the key to the
meaning and goal of human history, is rejected as a relic of a
cultural system that has been lost in the past and forgotten by
modern man.

Others have asked, “In our scientific age does the idea of God
make any difference in the direction of human betterment?”
And many have answered that it makes none at all, pointing
out that the believer and the unbeliever have to make the same
concrete decisions every day and no appreciable difference in
the caliber of their performances shows up. Appeals to heaven
do not improve economic, political, academic or civic achieve-
ments. Indeed, throughout history religious ideas, people and
institutions have backed the most diversified products on politi-

4. G. Siegmund, God On Trial, Quoted on pp. 225-226.

316 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

cal and moral markets. In the name of God, armies have fought
for radically opposed interests. Today the findings of such
sciences as sociology, history and other human studies confirm
the general feeling among men that the idea of God is simply
sterile.

There are those too, and their number is growing, who object
to the idea of God because they are convinced it is positively
harmful; it is a roadblock to progress. Such people accuse it of
conserving the unjust established order, indeed of justifying
this order’s existence, institutions and policies by appeals
to transcendent reasons. Thus the static idea of God negates
freedom and prevents creative human enterprise. As conser-
vative, it encapsulates man in sacred, untouchable, intoler-
able structures. Once again it is the idea of God that is the
cause of man’s alienation against society, for it has repeatedly
frustrated man’s efforts to reform his communities. In a des-
perate effort, therefore, to throw off the yoke of God and the
corrupt status quo, men have taken to the streets and campuses
in violence. The idea of God, therefore, is the goad, the agent
provocateur of total revolution. Paradoxically it has become
this while working to bring men peace in another world. By
directing man’s gaze upward toward another kingdom, the idea
of God has invited man to abandon himself to the designs of the
Absolute Being and to leave unattended the sublime adventure
of humanizing the only marvelous world at his creative dis-
posal.

All of these accusations against God have been systemati-
cally developed and given the fashionable ring of genuineness
over the past several centuries. We have seen how Feuerbach,
Nietzsche, Marx, Comte and the existentialists have molded
our age of atheism with their thinking tools and passionate
ideals. It is now time to investigate how today’s radical theolo-
gians have altered the tools and refashioned the atheism they
inherited from such great savants. We will find that, thanks to
the corrosive work of these philosopher-titans, the idea of God
had become an embarrassing liability to a section of academic
theologians. In an effort to dissolve their embarrassment at the
presence of a retarded God in their homes, modern radical
theologians decided to put God away decently. This caused a
furor in the Christian family. We must now analyze and assess

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 317

their case against God, studying the explanations they are pre-
senting the worldwide Christian Community that is angered at
what it sees as “the treason of the theologians.”

Precursors of the Radical Theologians

It is within the historical matrix of the philosophico-cultural
atheism already displayed that the “death of God” theologians
were formed and given to the world. Today they have become
famous through their works. Yet the transition of atheism from
the citadel of thought to the citadel of faith did not take place
all of a sudden. The way had to be prepared for this transition
by the prophets of secularism, themselves able theologians.
Though not “death of God” theologians themselves, these out-
standing Protestant theologians nevertheless laid down the
road their more radical successors would follow. Dedicated sin-
cerely to God in their personal lives and works, they yet ironi-
cally became messengers of the “death of God” theologians;
they unwittingly sowed the doctrinal seed from which would be
harvested a school of professional undertakers who would de-
cently manage the burial of God and religion.

A word must be said about the theological context in which
these precursor theologians lived and worked. Without a look
into the cultural atmosphere of their times, one would scarcely
do justice to the thought of such seminal thinkers as Bon-
hoeffer, Tillich, Bultmann, Robinson and Cox. Mascall reminds
us that, with the exception of Robinson and Cox, these men are
products of German Protestanism. Now, as Alasdair Macintyre
has astutely observed, modern Protestant theology is the child
of euphoria and catastrophe. It developed in the womb of lib-
eral idealism and was raised in the starkness of worldwide
social upheavals. The liberal theologians at the turn of the
century saw in man’s phenomenal scientific and cultural pro-
gress the sign of God’s approval of modern society. Suddenly,
however, they were rudely shocked out of their secular faith in
man’s goodness. and lost hope in his inevitably progressing
utopia when they witnessed the indescribable carnage and de-
struction of two World Wars. Tillich and Bultmann were army
chaplains, immersed in the agonizing experience of violent
killing. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and hung by the Nazis. Pie-

318 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tistic Protestant moralizing, against which Kierkegaard so vio-
lently revolted, was finally discredited in the face of such
cataclysmic catastrophes. Christians steeped in tragedy hun-
gered for faith and fortitude capable of sustaining their
wretched lives in God. The wars had revealed the falsity and
shallowness of a Christianity of consolations. Biblical Chris-
tianity, a Christianity of crisis and commitment, was rediscov-
ered and once again preached to contemporary man.

At the head of the tine of return from liberal reductionism to
the absolutely transcendent God of Revelation stood Karl
Barth. He relates a day of great disillusionment in his life thus:
“One day in early August 1914 stands out in my personal mem-
ory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals im-
pressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the
war policy of Wilhelm II and his counsellors. Among the intel-
lectuals I discovered to my horror almost all my theological
teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what
this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized
that I could no longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics
or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at
least, 19th century theology no longer held any future.”® Later,
in 1939, Barth was again shocked to see philosophers and
theologians flock to the defense of Nazism.

Karl Barth in his famous Commentary On Romans radically
rejected any efforts to translate God’s revelation to man in
philosophical or human terms. Paul had represented God
as infinitely transcendent, totally other and totally beyond
man. Revelation is an infinitely gracious condenscension of
God to man, a pure gift of love incarnated in the Word of
God, Jesus Christ. It must be received totally on God’s terms.
It helps to be pleased rationally with God’s revelation, but
pleased or not, man is consulted neither about its content
nor its manner of promulgation. God challenges man to accept
his revelation in complete faith, knowing full well that man
may rationalize his rejection of this revelation. Nevertheless,
rational argument about the faith is an exercise in arrogance.
And man must take the respective consequences for his accep-
tance or rejection of that revelation. Moreover, evil is a mys-

5. Quoted by David E. Jenkins in his Guide to the Debate About God, the
Westminster Press (Philadelphia: 1966) p. 74.

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 319

tery; in this life man cannot avoid or solve it. However, in Jesus
Christ, the Word of God, he can be redeemed and saved from its
tyranny.

Barth’s neo-orthodoxy, as it came to be called, did not entirely
escape liberalism’s infection. It conceded that the Bible as the
work of human authors could be fallible and yet, despite this
flaw in the truth, it demanded man’s adherence to its essential
truthfulness and authoritativeness. This psychological
dilemma of adhering wholeheartedly by faith to historical or
factual error proved too much for reasonable men, as well it
should. Harold O. J. Brown, Congregational minister, writes
about this difficulty thus: “In effect, the neo-orthodox de-
manded a new kind of ‘leap of faith’ into the irrational. One
was asked to believe in ‘the great truths of revelation’ in spite
of all evidence . . . This irrational belief in traditional dogmas
without a credible foundation in trustworthy revelation proved
difficult for the neo-orthodox professors to communicate to
their students.” The result was that neo-orthodoxy lost the
academic field to the existentialist, demythologizing, rational-
istic theology of Rudolf Bultmann and his disciples, who today
have come to dominate Protestant theology in Germany and
the United States in the persons of the already mentioned pre-
cursor theologians.

All of them—including Robinson, Cox and some Catholic
American theologians—represent, each with his own distinc-
tive indifferences, a strong reaction to the utterly transcendent
supernaturalism and revelationism of the school of Barth,
Brunner and Heim. Can the secularist emphasis introduced by
these men into theology be explained as a much-needed,
healthy swing back from that extreme supernaturalism which
left man unconcerned about humanizing his cosmos and com-
munity? Whatever may be the answer to this query, it is indis-
putable that among these theologians God and grace are sought
and found more often—indeed almost solely—in the realm of
nature, man and history than in the realm of the supernatural,
which seems to have been abandoned as a myth. Bonhoeffer
leaves no doubt of the new emphasis in theology in his famous
letters from prison:

6. H. O. J. Brown, “The Struggle for the German Church,” in National Re-
view, April 8, 1969, pp. 334-337.

320 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance
without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In ques-
tions concerning science, art and even ethics, this has be-
come an understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt
at any more. But for the last hundred years or so it has
been increasingly true of religious questions also: it is
becoming evident that everything gets along without
“God,” and just as well as before.”

Now, as we shall see more in detail in the following chapters;
all “the death of God” theologians claim that Dietrich Bon-
hoeffer is the inspiration for their theology of readjustment
and accomodation to modern man. The work that shook them
from their theological lethargy is Bonhoeffer’s Letters And Pa-
pers From Prison. According to David E. Jenkins, “Bonhoeffer
is a martyr of the Christian Faith in the old and original sense
of that term, viz. one who witnessed to the reality of his faith
in conditions of great stress, culminating in suffering and
death.”* What was Bonhoeffer’s mission in life? His ambition
was to bring a world, estranged from God religiously and cul-
turally, back to a fruitful reconsideration of the reality of the
Divine and the significance of a Christian life of commitment.
He strove to reactivate in the Christian way of life a specific
social and biblical quality that could reconcile isolated, hostile
Western culture to the divine and human ideals of its Founder.
As a reformer, he became at once the iconoclast of the false
conception of God abroad among Christians and the catalyst
for a new theological openness to the modern world and the
culture that shaped it.

According to Bonhoeffer, God, as the rescuer who drops out of
the blue to handle man’s insoluble problems or redeem his fail-
ures, is an idol. God as a universal anodyne is a caricature of
the true God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is the God who
is present in the world in weakness and suffering. Moreover, a
misconception on the nature of the Christian Community must
also be cleared up. The urgency for this clarification arose from
the fact that the crisis between the world and the Christian

7. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters And Papers From Prison, ed. by Eberhard
Bethge, trans. by Reginald H. Fuller (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1953), p. 195.

8. David E. Jenkins, Guide To The Debate About God (Philadelphia: The
Westminister Press, 1966), p. 99. k . :

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 321

Community had produced a crisis within the Church itself. Not
only was the nature of the Church in doubt but also what man-
ner of life and policies she should follow in order to reclaim the
world for Christ. Bonhoeffer approached the solution of this
problem of the Christian Community through the terms of Fer-
dinand Tönnies, using his categories of Gemeinschaft and Ge-
sellschaft—Community and Society—in an attempt to relate
sociology and theology in a meaningful way to the Christian
Church. He attempted to show how the Christian Community
differed from other societies. In doing so, he rejected the an-
swers of secular sociologists and religious apologists. He insis-
ted that the specific difference between secular societies and
Christian communities did not derive from the profession of
faith in a transcendent God nor from the performance of reli-
gious rites in the latter to the exclusion of these in the former.
For Bonhoeffer, Christian life is not dependent on any ec-
clesiastical structures or totally transcendent Power. On the
contrary, Christian life consists in a life lived totally for the
other in powerlessness and suffering. Thus the difference be-
tween Christians and atheists is not that Christians belong to
a new religion but that Christians, in their concern for others,
should seek their transcendent God “not in tasks beyond their
scope and power but in the nearest Thou at hand, in man.” God
is to be found in every human form, in imitation of the Cru-
cified who existed for others. In the modern world religion is no
longer a necessary condition for justification. Perhaps only a
“religionless Christianity” is relevant in our times for it alone
will bring men to join Jesus in his sufferings for others. The
challenge of the day is that Christians participate in the suffer-
ings of God even if these come at the hands of a godless world.
This calls for Christian immersion in the affairs and life of the
godless world, not to gloss over its godlessness with a veneer of
religion in an attempt to transfigure it.°

Man today takes the world seriously; he has grown out of a
certain kind of infantilism; he depends no longer on religious
fairy tales for an explanation of the workings of the universe;
he no longer stands by, expecting miracles to rout his evils and
problems. Rather he sets to work with the skills of science and
technology to create a world of real hope and progress today

9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters And Papers From Prison, p. 224.

322 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

and in the immediate tomorrow. Modern man, in a word, “has
come of age.” Is Bonhoeffer telling modern mature man that he
no longer needs God or religion or spiritual services, that he is
now sufficient unto himself? The Christian reader, irritated at
the imprecise, challenging and shocking language sometimes
used by Bonhoeffer might be tempted to write him off as a man
who, under the duress of his prison hardships, abandoned his
faith in God and his allegiance to Christianity. But this would
be a premature judgment. Bonhoeffer was writing, as a suffer-
ing prophet in prison, thoughts that moved him suddenly, that
he had no time to work on reflectively and to balance carefully
with the Scriptures. In one of his letters he expresses his own
dissatisfaction with a prospective book on theology which he is
outlining. “I am often shocked at the things I am saying, espe-
cially in the first part; which is mainly critical... But the whole
subject has never been properly thrashed out, so it sounds very
undigested.”'° Despite the fragmentary aspects of this theol-
ogy, he does give incontrovertible proof of his deep faith up to
the end. Powerless as Christ in his own Gethsemane of a Nazi
prison camp, like Him also about to be violently edged out of
this world, Bonhoeffer, in a letter dated August 1944, nine
months before the Nazi hangman took his life, expressed his fi-
delity to God and Christianity in these eloquent words:

All that we rightly expect from God and pray for is to be
found in Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ has nothing
to do with all that we, in our human way, think he can and
ought to do. We must persevere in quiet meditation on the
life, sayings, deeds, sufferings and death of Jesus in order
to learn what God promises and what he fulfills. One thing
is certain: we must always live close to the presence of
God, for that is newness of life; and then nothing is impos-
sible for all things are possible with God; no earthly power
can touch us without his will, and danger can only drive
us closer to him. We can claim nothing for ourselves, and
yet we may pray for everything. Our joy is hidden in suf-
fering, our life in death. But all through we are sustained
in a wondrous fellowship. To all this God in Jesus has
given his Yea and his Amen, and that is the firm ground
on which we stand. In these turbulent times we are always
forgetting what it is that makes life really worth while.

10. Jbid., p. 245.

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 323

We think that life has a meaning for us so long as such and
such a person still lives. But the truth is that if this earth
was good enough for the Man Jesus Christ, if a man like
him really lived in it, then, and only then, has life a mean-
ing for us. If Jesus had not lived, then our life, in spite of
all the other people we know and honour and love, would
be without meaning."

Unfortunately, today many secularizing theologians are de-
manding Christianity’s total conformity to the world in the
name and writings of Bonhoeffer. Acquainted with Bonhoef-
fer’s ideas through Robinson’s Honest To God, he and they have
made use only of this heroic German’s Letters And Papers
From Prison ina process that dilutes Christianity down to Bult-
mann’s and Tillich’s disincarnated, humanistic idealism. Thus,
they have seriously misrepresented the abiding faith of a great
Christian witness. René Marlé in his perceptive study, Bon-
hoeffer: The Man And His Work, tells us that “in Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s theological thinking, prematurely cut short, the
Church always held pride of place. It is indeed, then, in the
concrete and historical community of believers that union
with Christ and with God takes place (for Bonhoeffer) .. . In
this connection he condemned the resentment which it is all
too easy for the faithful to feel toward their Church and the
‘dogmatic frivolousness’ that so often precedes it.™? The
deep Christian convictions of Bonhoeffer were concretely
and movingly recorded in his two books The Cost Of Disciple-
ship and Life Together. But the secularists, anxious to read a
position of atheism into Bonhoeffer’s tentative theological
speculations while in prison, hardly ever refer to these works.
Yet Bonhoeffer never fell away from the allegiance to Christ,
His revealed truth and His Church. Thus, the attempt to make
of him the prophetic precursor of modern, ultra-liberal theolog-
ical atheism is a grievous falsification. He was an impassioned
defender of Christian doctrine and its irreducible demands. In
a memoir, Lutheran Bishop Gerhard Jacobi wrote forcefully of
Bonhoeffer’s rock-like faith: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer never for a
moment doubted in the trinitarian God. He would have fought

11. Ibid., pp. 243, 244.
12. René Marlé, Bonhoeffer: The Man And His Work, trans. by Rosemary
Sheed (New York: Newman Press, 1968), pp. 41, 44.

324 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to the death our modern flirting with unbelief.”

But the question is justly asked: How have the secularizing
theologians been able to succeed in using Bonhoeffer as an
instrument with which to distort Christianity and erect upon
this distortion a secular Church of easy, earthly salvation?
First of all we must admit that this unwarranted truncation of
Bonhoeffer’s Christian faith is partially due to some of his in-
felicitous expressions and audacious theological distinctions.
Taken out of context, they seemed to indicate that he was
either “naturalizing” or even abandoning the truths of Chris-
tianity. As expressed, some of his ideas cannot be accepted by
a true Christian. His distinction between the Christian faith
and Christian religion would seem to make the Church which
he loved so well useless and expendable. A religionless Chris-
tianity is the death of Christianity. His expression “man come
of age” did not really mean, for him, man independent of God,
but man able to do many more marvelous things because of his
great discoveries in rapidly advancing science. Admittedly, he
seems to reduce man’s relation to God to man’s life in “exis-
tence for others,” a life similar to the self-donated life of Jesus.
Moreover, he seems to deny the infinity of transcendence, ad-
mitting only transcendence toward the neighbor where God
dwells. This doctrine seems to lock man’s destiny in a time-
space-matter immanence. Yet despite these imprecise, tenta-
tive theological speculations written in personal letters meant
only for the eyes of an intimate friend, himself a staunch Chris-
tian and thus not prone to take scandal at such reflections, thé
last view we have of Bonhoeffer, five minutes before his execu-
tion, shows him in prayer before the Father and Jesus Christ
who filled his whole life. The prison doctor records the scene:
“Through the half-open door I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling
in fervent prayer to the Lord his God. The devotion and evident
conviction of being heard that I saw in the prayer of this in-
tensely captivating man moved me to the depths.”

In her study in depth, Life And Death Of Dietrich Bon-
hoeffer, Miss Mary Bosanquet records how Bonhoeffer’s ideas
pushed to their pejorative and never-intended consequences,

13. Ibid., cited on p. 61.
14. Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean, Christian Counter-Attack, (London: Bland-
ford Press, 1969), p. 84.

Bonhoeffer: The God of the Saeculum 325

were abused to erect a counterfeit Christianity. She writes:
“Some of the phrases from Bonhoeffer’s Letters have been ap-
propriated and carried away like stones from a half-built
church to be used as the foundations of theological superstruc-
tures for which he would have disclaimed any responsibility.”**
Moreover, the secularizers never understood Bonhoeffer’s dis-
tinction between “ultimate” and “penultimate” truths. The “ul-
timate” things were in God’s hands. Since he and his friend
Bethge were in solid agreement on these Christian fundamen-
tals, there was no need to discuss them in their letters. But the
“penultimate realities” expressed ways of making Christian
truths meaningful to the modern generation. How could the
Christian Church identify. with the modern world in order to
save it and yet not lose her own identity as the Body of Christ?
The secularizers interpreted Bonhoeffer as calling for the de-
Christianization of Christianity as the only means of saving the
modern scientific world. Yet in reality Bonhoeffer taught that
Christianity must maintain its identity as the Body of Christ.
And he even indicated the “secret discipline” she must continu-
ally exercize in order to remain faithful to her Founder and His
message. That “secret discipline” called for Christians to
devote themselves as a community to prayer, meditation, com-
mon worship and the reception of the sacraments. Religionless
Christianity meant not capitulation but openness to the world,
not isolation from but availability to others in a service that
extended to them the true message of Christ and His charity.
Indeed, Bonhoeffer rejected explicitly and in writing the de-
mythologized gospel of Bultmann and the secularizers who
were using new methods in biblical scholarship to filter out of
Christianity any historical evidence of God’s marvelous en-
trance into human history and the human family for the pur-
pose of saving and divinizing man. He wrote:

We have so far spoken of the present Christ; but this pre-
sent-historical (geschichtlich) Christ is the same person
as the historical (historisch) Jesus of Nazareth. Were this
not so, we would have to say with Paul that our faith is
vain and an illusion. The Church would be deprived of its
substance. There can be no isolation of the so-called his-

15. Mary Bosanquet, The Life And Death Of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), Quoted by Lunn and Lean, op. cit., p. 85.

326 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

torical (historisch) Jesus from the Christ who is present
now... The historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of Jesus Christ
comes under the twofold aspect of history (Historie) and
faith. Both aspects are closely associated.'®

We have had to treat Bonhoeffer in a study of modern athe-
ism not because he himself ever flirted with the thought
of denying God, but because some of his sayings have been
constructed by the secularizers into a bridge that leads inevita-
bly to the loss of all faith and the “disestablishment of all
churches.” In a world whose “figure” is changing rapidly, even
violently, toward unbelief, underground churches and drop-out
Christians, we had to set the record straight about this attrac-
tive, modern theologican and martyr and, by removing an effec-
tive weapon from the hands of false brethren, stem the
stampede of the faithful out of the fold.

16. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology, (London: 1966), pp. 71-76. Quoted by
. René Marlé in Bonhoeffer: The Man And His Work, p. 70.

Part Three

é
Dg
i
bs

Gods as Myths of the Modern Mentality

The Resurrection is not itself a fact of history. Such an impossible

marvel could only spring from mythology. The Resurrection cannot be

historical because the return of a dead man to life here on earth

merely revives a myth and its contradictions. The Resurrection for us
is something clearly unbelievable.

Kerygma And Myth

Rudolf Bultmann

The overwhelming experience of the disciples is the great historical
event which we call the Resurrection . .. Precisely what happened to
the body we shall never know . . . Some will find it possible and natural
to accept a literal vanishing or transformation of the elements which
composed the flesh of Jesus. Others will think that what the disciples
subsequently saw was a vision of Jesus alive: others again that it was
what the psychic investigators would call his “astral” body. But all this
is quite secondary . . . No, the proof of the matter lay for them within.

328 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

And it was clinched for them in what we call the Appearances. Exactly
how physical or how psychological these were, I don’t think it matters.
Sunday Mirror (London)

December 22, 1963 p. 29.

John A. T. Robinson

I readily believe those witnesses who get their throats cut.
Pensées
Blaise Pascal

CHAPTER XI

Bultmann:

The Demythologized God

WITH HIS SMALL BUT IMPORTANT WORK The New Testa-
ment and Mythology, published in 1941,! Rudolf Bultmann es-
tablished himself as an extraordinary but controversial leader
of the revolution in Protestant theology. This work has aroused
strong condemnations from many sides, especially from ortho-
dox and neo-orthodox theologians, for it challenges and rejects
traditional Protestant and Catholic doctrines. Moreover, it has
plunged many young spirits into the darkness of doubt, detach-
ing them tragically from traditional Christianity and deliver-
ing them instead to a purely philosophical existentialism that
calls itself “the new and modern theology” or “the existential-
ist interpretation of the New Testament.”

Basically Bultmann’s theology takes its orientation from two
deeply subjective preoccupations. First, there is Bultmann’s

1. Rudolf Bultmann, The New Testament And Mythology. This essay can be
found, along with a text of the. violent debates it had given rise to, in the two
volumes entitled Kerygma And Myth. There Dr. A. M. Farrer gives a penetrat-
ing critique of Bultmann’s theory of demythologization.

330 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

concern for making the message of the Gospel meaningful and
relevant to modern, scientific society. Secondly, and perhaps
consequently, there is Bultmann’s historical scepticism about
the reality of the New Testament events. In his effort to gain
for the Gospel a relevancy acceptable to scientific man, Bult-
mann developed a theology which called for the confrontation
between the Christian message and myth. He undertook a se-
lective, though rather thorough, demythologization of the New
Testament message. Indeed, he went further and himself es-
tablished just what the Christian message must mean for
scientific man.

Bultmann’s thesis is that modern scientific man simply can-
not accept any longer the mythological stories strewn through-
out the New Testament. After all, according to Bultmann, the
New Testament writers were not writing history. Their times
and their mentalities were saturated with prescientific, imagi-
nary cosmologies and mythological legends. Moreover, there is
nothing original in the New Testament myths. A quick review
of their contents reveals this fact. There is that three-tiered
universe of heaven, earth and hell. Earth is influenced by the
powers of both heaven and hell; never is earth the master of its
own destiny. Before the redemption, Satan and his minions
controlled it; they temporarily seized it from the control of
heaven and its legions of angels. Before the redemption, these
evil spirits dominated man through their power of sin and
death. When the redemption was accomplished in the life,
death and resurrection of Christ, the God-Man, the grip of the
underworld was broken. Now man is liberated from sin, death
and Satan. Now he is capable of achieving salvation by choos-
ing to live with God through his acceptance of Christ. The Cross
and the Resurrection precipitated a cosmic catastrophe for the,
powers of hell and evil men; they simultaneously precipitated
a cosmic celebration for the powers of heaven and saintly men.
Soon the second coming of Christ will herald the final defeat
of the powers of the nether world. At that time there will take
place the resurrection of the dead and Christ’s final judgment
of all men and angels. In the meantime, believers united by
faith in these saving events are incorporated in Christ through
Baptism and the Eucharist which, along with the other five
sacraments, work like physical causes to save and sanctify.

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 331

Now according to Bultmann such New Testament mythology
merely reproduces the Jewish apocalyptic mythology of salva-
tion in combination with the Hellenic gnostic myth of redemp-
tion. Both these pre-Christian myths proposed the dualistic
doctrine of a world of men struggling for salvation from domi-
nation by a satanic underworld through a divine liberation
from a world beyond. The Jewish myth hoped for a heaven on
earth after the coming and conquests of the Messiah, while the
gnostic myth predicted the descent from a luminous world of
the Son of God clothed as a man who would by doctrine and
deed liberate man and lead him to a celestial fatherland.

Modern scientific thought, according to Bultmann, has ex-
ploded all three mythologies. If Christianity is to avoid perish-
ing like its Jewish and gnostic precursor-messianisms, it will
have to demythologize its message and accomodate it to the
needs of the scientific mind. Somehow it must keep the idea of
revelation and of a non-mythological presence of God in his-
tory. For the mythology conceals rather than reveals the true
message of the Gospel. Such fantasies as sin, Satan, a war be-
tween upper and lower worlds for the conquest of this world
have been exploded by the development of the human sciences.
Only a schizophrenic can believe these fictions today. Man has
become his own master in the physical world through the in-
credible advancement of his reason, sciences and technology.
His universe is closed upon itself, determined by its physical
laws and no supernatural powers can irrupt into time to pro-
duce effects independent of these laws or of man’s autonomous
freedom. Man alone is responsible for his own and his world’s
social and scientific advancement. It is inconceivable, there-
fore, that modern man accept the fable that spirits and sacra-
ments produce physical effects in history. As for a God who
destroys his own innocent Son in order to save man through a
vicarious redemption, such a story is too barbaric and repulsive
to be accepted as reasonable. Indeed the whole effort to tie the
Christian message to myths and images is vain and sterile.
That is why many modern men have abandoned Christianity.

Nevertheless, Bultmann is not in favor of so complete a de-
mythologization that no myths at all remain in the Christian
message. Only those archaic, traditional representations which
needlessly provoke revulsion in the scientific mind are to be

332 THE GODS. OF ATHEISM

dropped from the preaching of the Gospel. Indeed, Bultmann
holds it against the Protestant liberal school of theology that it
betrayed the Gospel message by totally demythologizing it. Lib-
eral theology failed to maintain the radical incompatibility
between God and man; it begot an insufferable overconfidence
of man in himself; it removed the healthy shock and scandal
effect of the message of the Cross, putting to sleep in man’s
consciousness his sense of insecurity, his need for redemption
and his hunger for encounter with God. Liberal theology hid the
scandal of the Cross and presented only the crown of human
self-sufficiency. That is why its total demythologization, from
Harnack on, was such a total failure.

Thus Bultmann’s demiythologization is only partial and
highly selective. He would preserve the mythical image of cor-
poral nourishment whereby the Body of Christ advances in
spiritual growth. Though displeased with the image of a baptis-
mal rebirth from spiritual death, he approves the mythical idea
of salvation from acceptance of the preaching of the Word of
God. The criterion of selection comes down to this: Authentic
demythologization eliminates anthropomorphic images of
transcendence offensive to the scientific mind; it rejects all
images of direct divine intervention into human history be-
cause they reduce God to a reality of this world and man to a
mere automation. The truth of the matter is that God is totally
hidden, entirely out of science, history and the universe, while
man is totally immersed in this world, obligated to achieve his
authentic existence through the enlightened, responsible exer-
cise of his liberty. Thus, authentic myths reveal the Gospel’s
message to be an existentialist challenge for man to under-
stand himself fully and thereby to attain mature, authentic
human existence. Against such an interpretation of myths in
the Gospel the modern mentality will not in principle raise any
objections.

Existentialist Interpretation of the New Testament

What does Bultmann understand by an existentialist inter-
pretation of the New Testament? He frankly admits that his
explanation of this expression is inspired by the philosophy of
Martin Heidegger. We may recall that Heidegger’s philosophy,

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 333

as expounded in Being And Time, is essentially a transcenden-
tal analysis of Dasein, that is, of man thrown into existence in
this world, yet facing up to his radical anxiety and destination
to death by decisions that give himself and his world some
transcendent meaning. Reflective introspection on the existen-
tial state of human existence reveals that men live in two op-
posing styles. Some men live an authentic human existence.
They accept the dereliction of being thrown into existence
from nothing and their destiny through death toward nothing.

They realize that human existence is trapped in temporality
` from its superfluous birth to its annihilating death. Despite this
radical absurdity and finitude, such men courageously give
meaning to their lives and world, projecting themselves con-
stantly forward into a future made meaningful through their
serious, reflective, responsible exercise of liberty. On the other
hand, those who live inauthentic existences flee the anxiety
and insecurity of human existence; they take refuge in the
common delusions of the masses; their beliefs, rules, ends,
cares, ambitions are harmonized with those of the amorphous
crowd in which they gladly lose themselves. They choose to
be part of the one, many, they—preferring the peace of
anonymity to the fight for subjecthood. Whereas those who live
authentic lives choose to become subjects, I’s, that is, coherent
conscious persons making their own plans and decisions. Au-
thentic persons, because of their commitments, are called by
Heidegger Dasein, inauthentic men, because they have chosen
to live like inanimate objects, are called by Heidegger Vor-
handensein.

Utilizing such Heideggerian concepts and terms, Bultmann
goes on to reveal the meaning of the Gospel relevant to modern
man. This message is never theoretic nor speculative; it is per-
sonalist and existentialist. Therefore, most elements in the
Gospel which seem to be objective representations or historical
or doctrinal matters must be discarded. Only those elements
that stress man’s authentic existence and its existential condi-
tions are to be retained. Thus, the kerygma of the Gospel pro-
claims that the true significance of Jesus is that He summons
man to make the decision to face up to his dire destiny to death.
In Jesus man receives a mature understanding of his precari-
ous existence. The Cross and the Resurrection as salvation

334 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

events are recovered not as history but as personal commit-
ments. The decision to encounter God in these events is really
the decision to achieve authentic existence. Faith alone,
achieved in man’s affirmative encounter with God, leads man
to the acceptance of Heidegger’s particular understanding of
human existence. Indeed the preacher of the Word of God
should stress this particular understanding as the true mean-
ing of the Gospel, even using Heidegger’s terms rather than
traditional teaching to expound the roles of God, Jesus and men
in the adventure of salvation. Heidegger’s emphasis on man’s
fall and tragic existence renders his philosophy most apt as an
existentialist hermeneutics, an excellent corrective of irra-
tional mythology.

For example, let us apply this hermeneutics to the idea of sin.
Traditional theology tells us that sin is an aversio a Deo and it
invites us to sorrow for sin and a confession of it unto the grace
of reconciliation. But modern man is displeased with this idea
of aversion, confession, conversion, reconciliation in relation
to an offended God. He is no longer interested in such irrelevant
mythology because it does not cure his existential anxiety and
dereliction. Such abstract terminology leaves man cold and in-
different. But the preacher who shows man that sin is an irre-
sponsible flight and a fall from authentic existence into the
banality of common anonymity will move man deeply by chal-
lenging him to get back to God by first getting back to his own
authentic human existence. He will show too that the existen-
tial character of pardon and reconciliation are human deci-
sions and responsibilities. The fall will be seen not as an
impersonal inherited fault but as a cowardly flight. Thus the
sinner will be troubled and his refusal to accept the existential
meaning of the Gospel message to become his true self will
confront him with his personal perfidy. Thus too the scandal
and shock of the Christian message will be restored as the
mythological aspects are removed. Preaching the Word of God
in such an existential manner, Bultmann argues, goads man
toward faith in such a manner that it forces him into a deeper
understanding of himself and his human condition. For belief
and unbelief are not blind and arbitrary actions working au-
tomatically like magical charms, but they are a Yes or No made
with knowledge and freedom. Neither belief nor unbelief

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 335

should be founded on exterior signs—miracles, divine interven-
tions, historical events, ceremonies and sacraments—but on
interior encounter, motivation and decision. Faith is, therefore,
founded on an apologetic of immanence, not on a fideism char-
acteristic of so much traditional theology. Man is saved by
faith, by his response to God who challenges him to an interior
encounter with himself through man’s acceptance of the Cross
and the Resurrection not as historical events but as signs of
God’s calling. Moreover, the faith does not endow the believer
with any superior state of being nor with a redemption con-
ceived in terms of a cosmic process. For the decision for faith
is not achieved once for all; it must be eternally renewed under
each concrete challenge to infidelity. Then too the Spirit
spoken of in the New Testament is not another mysterious
Being; this would be irrelevant mythology again. The Spirit
signifies merely the individual’s achievement of the decision
not to live selfishly any longer but to live for others, to love and
serve his fellow man. Thus, the meaning of the New Testament
accords substantially with the Heideggerian analysis of au-
thentic human existence. Both messages are the fruit of a natu-
ral analysis and inspiration. Faith consists now in the decision
for a natural commitment to authentic existence. Bultmann’s
pupil, W. Kamlah, drew the inevitable conclusions from his
master’s existentialist and naturalistic interpretation of the
Christian message. Kamlah concluded that the life of faith is
independent of any divine events that took place in Palestine
in the first century; it is independent of the existence of any
supernatural or divine being. Faith is the fruit of a particular
philosophy, not of a divine revelation irrupting into human
history. The demythologized Christian message turns out to be
merely a nominally theistic existentialism evolving under the
new hermeneutics into an atheistic philosophy, into an atheis-
tic humanism. Faith is reduced to philosophy, one particular
philosophy—Heidegger’s—and the passage of man from the pa-
gan to the Christian state is rendered utterly meaningless. For
all that man has to do to attain the faith is to decide to live an
authentic human existence, a feat needing no new religion,
revelation nor divine intervention. For all men are capable by
natural powers of becoming Heideggerian saints, Dasein. In
the last analysis, in the hermeneutics of Bultmann, Christ and

336 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Christianity have become the new mythology—irrelevant, be-
cause totally secularized, to the pre-scientific and the scientific
mentality.

The Role of Christ in the Event of Salvation

Bultmann rejects traditional theology’s explanation of the
deed of salvation. Orthodox theology has consistently taught
that Christians put their faith in events that actually happened
in history. These events can be objectively dated and histori-
cally proven to have taken place outside the inner conscious-
ness of men and even against their very opposition. But for
Bultmann this belief in an objectively determinable history of
salvation is irrelevant, scandalous mythology. According to
him, once the event of salvation in Christ is demythologized,
that event then has no objectively recognizable reality. Bult-
mann admits that in one sense the divine event of salvation has
objective reality. He maintains that God has really accom-
plished in Christ sornething which has happened outside of
man. But he denies that this salvation event is recognizable by
man as an objective, historical event. On the contrary, this
event eludes every human method of historical investigation.
Reason cannot grasp or explain it. For the event of salvation is
grasped only in the interior act of faith, within the decision
each man makes to accept God.

-But the question is asked, “How does the life of Jesus fit into
the event of salvation, as the New Testament insists it does?”
The New Testament represents Jesus as existing before the
dawn of history as the Logos, the Son of God. Moreover, it iden-
tifies Jesus as that same eternal Son, incarnate in the man,
Jesus of Nazareth, who saves mankind by His death on the
Cross. It represents Jesus as a thaumaturge performing super-
human prodigies, even raising others and Himself from the
state of death. Bultmann rejects all this. He explains that:the
New Testament is clothing the life of Jesus with mythology in
these events. The reason for this embellishment of the life of
Jesus is that His disciples wanted to stress the truth that God
had decreed to save men through the life and deeds of the man
Jesus of Nazareth. Hence the mythology of divine pre-exist-
ence and divine thaumaturgy as natural endowments of Jesus

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 337

is not to be taken as historical fact but to be viewed solely as
notification that God saves men in Jesus. When pressed to ex-
plain precisely how man is saved by the Crucifixion and Resur-
rection of the man Jesus, Bultmann responds by introducing a
perceptive distinction in his interpretation of the salvation
event, the distinction between kistorisch and geschichtlich,
each word pertaining to a different historical aspect of an
event.?

An event is historical (historisch) when it is a fact fixed in
time, established by experience and verified by objectively his-
torical methods. An event is historical (geschichtlich) when
it is temporal reality, but one which cannot be fixed in time
nor caught in experimental certification. Creation and the
work of salvation are historical in the second sense, in the
sense of geschichtlich. Yet the world and men, which make
up the content of these divine events, themselves create His-
tory (Geschichte) and are simultaneously called historical (ge-
schichtlich) inso far as they are viewed in their relationship to
divine action and especially to the divine action of salvation.
Now when Bultmann applies this distinction to the Cross, he
produces the following explanation of the role of Jesus in the
event of man’s salvation. The Cross is an historical (historisch)
event in the sense that the Crucifixion of Jesus is a fact-fixed
in past. history, capable of indubitable, objective verification.
But the Christian message has endowed this event of history
with cosmic dimensions. It expresses these dimensions through
mythological representations. What does the New Testament
hope to attain by such mythology? It is its method for making
man grasp the significance, the non-static, non-verifiable, his-
torical (geschichtlich) capacity of the Cross. According to the
New Testament, the Cross in the divine designs is endowed
with the value of an historical (geschichtlich) event; that is, an
event pregnant with meaning for the entire human race in its
relationship to God. And that meaning and value consist in this,
that in the Cross God has decreed and effected the liberation of
man from the powers of the world. In the Cross God judges man

2. René Marlé explains that the single word for “history” can be rendered in
German as either Geschichte or Historie. The distinction expresses “history as
reality” and “history as science,” terms used by Maurice Blondel. Bultmann

uses this distinction to nudge God out of New Testament history back into
invisible history.

338 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

and reveals to him his condition as a sinner along with his
impotence to rise from sin to authentic existence by his own
powers. In the Cross God enlightens man to the truth that if he
admits his own impotence, he will be regenerated by the gratui-
tous mercy of God. In what precise sense, then, does God accom-
plish His decree to liberate man by the Cross? Bultmann
responds thus: Certainly not in the sense that Christ has mer-
ited man’s salvation by His death on the Cross. That interpreta-
tion proposes the myth of vicarious redemption, a theory
obnoxious to the modern mind. The true message of the Cross
is as follows: God’s decree to save man, considered in its divine
origins, is an act posited beyond time. The Cross accomplishes
this decree by giving it expression and fulfillment in time. In
the concrete Cross of Christ God manifests the condemnation
that weighs on all men. In that bloodied Cross God notifies man
of his condition of personal sinfulness, condemnation and cru-
cifixion. In a word, then, the concrete Cross of Christ is not the
accomplishment but the notification of salvation. This notifica-
tion is prolonged throughout history for all men in the teaching
of the apostles and the preaching of the ministers of the
Church. The Christian kerygma re-presents the Cross event of
the past in such a manner that the conditions for an encounter
with God are ever present for contemporary man. Thus the
eternal act of God’s decree for salvation becomes in Christian
preaching an enduring, temporal, a truly historical (geschicht-
lich) act, accompanying man throughout all ages, ceaselessly
challenging him kic et nunc to ratify his encounter of faith
with God:

Finally, man either accepts this decree of salvation as pro-
claimed in Christian preaching or rejects it. If he accepts salva-
tion, he accepts it in faith alone. Bultmann, good Protestant
that he is, cannot emphasize this fact enough. The event of
salvation has taken place outside of man, true enough. But
outside of man the event does not possess any transcendent
dimensions. It does so only when it is clothed with otherworldly
fantasies, too ridiculous to be accepted by modern man. Be-
cause of this lack of transcendence, the competent historian
sees in the Cross of Christ a mere incident of past history, at
best a miscarriage of justice in which an innocent man is put
to death by his enemies; he does not see any enduring value to

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 339

this event. Thus, the historical (geschichtlich) scope of the Cru-
cifixion entirely escapes him, for there is no grasp nor under-
standing of the act of God save in actual faith. This is so true,
the acceptance of the event of salvation is reserved so exclu-
sively to faith that one can say that salvation is accomplished
in the decision for faith itself. For faith is the operation of the
Spirit, the gift of God, the act of God, the act of salvation par
excellence. Thus Bultmann insists that the meaning of the
Cross, when the event is demythologized, is as follows: “God
judges me; God crucifies me. In revealing to me my impotence
to liberate myself through my own efforts God invites me to
accept the Cross and thus find authentic existence.” On the
other hand, the traditional doctrine which Bultmann rejects is
as follows: “Christ has expiated for me and in my place; the Son
of God has merited salvation for me through his death. By
putting my faith in the Son of God I attain salyation and au-
thentic existence as a man.”

Thus, for Bultmann, the historical (historisch) event of the
Cross has also an eschatologically historical. (geschichtlich)
significance; it is an event both for time and for beyond time.
On the occasion of hearing the Christian message of the Cross,
the potential believer is interiorly challenged by God to accept
the divine decree for his salvation. In saying Yes to this chal-
lenge the believer attains simultaneously both faith and salva-
tion. Yet he must continually repeat his Yes against every
temptation to abandon God until his day of dying. Thus, man is
saved by an interior act of faith, not by the myth of a past death
of Christ on the Cross which is a vicarious act of salvation in
itself. The Gross is used by God merely to notify man of His
decree to save man. It is a signpost to the interior way of salva-
tion, the encounter with God ratified by faith.

When he comes to consider the Resurrection as the event of
salvation, Bultmann once again parts company with the New
Testament narratives. Clearly the New Testament bases man’s
salvation as much on the Resurrection as on the Cross. But
Bultmann’s explanation is slightly different here than it is in
his explanation of the Cross. He admitted the historical (his-
torisch) reality of the Cross as an objective event that hap-
pened in the past under Pontius Pilate. But he denies the
“empirical fact” of the Resurrection; the Resurrection is not

340 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

historical in the sense of historisch. Scientific man cannot ac-
cept it; it is pure myth to proclaim that a cadaver has been
reanimated. For this would call for an irruption of the divine,
of the supernatural, into the human and natural, an eventual-
ity already seen to be impossible. Thus for Bultmann Christ did
not rise from the dead, did not live a glorified life on earth, did
not show His glorified body to His Apostles, nor eat with them,
nor send them on their missions to convert the world. None of
these narrations were empirically observed by men. What then
is Bultmann’s meaning for the Resurrection in Christian
preaching?

In order to understand his teaching on this event we must
contrast it with his teaching on the meaning of the Cross. Now
we recall that the Cross of Christ signified in time the decree
God had made ab aeterno to save man. It notified man both of
his condemnation and salvation, of his challenge to rise from
inauthentic to authentic existence. Yet the Cross did not in any
way signify man’s triumph over death. Now the role of the
Resurrection myth is to do precisely that, to notify man of his
victory over death by his acceptance of salvation through faith.
It was God who moved the disciples to proclaim the Resurrec-
tion myth. God utilized their mentalities, already precondi-
tioned and attached to the mythologies of their Graeco-Judaic
culture, to formulate the myth of the Resurrection. The action
of God produced in their spirits an image of a corporeal] resur-
rection in order to give them and the world an understanding
of the triumphant value of the Cross. The Resurrection is thus
a totally interior event, taking place solely in the souls of the
disciples and their believing followers. The Resurrection is not
an objective, corporeal, observable event. To profess faith in
the Resurrection, therefore, is merely to accept in faith, not an
historical (kistorisch) objective event of past history, but sim-
ply the triumphant scope of the Cross. The Cross is the factual
drama that happened in history; the Resurrection is merely the
realization within the souls of Christ’s disciples that the Cross
is also a victory over death. Yet both Cross and Resurrection are
merely expressions of the event of salvation which is accom-
plished in the souls of men as they say Yes throughout history
to God in the encounter of the faith. On the occasion of the
preaching of the Cross and Resurrection men are challenged

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 341

interiorly to accept by faith hic et nunc the decree of salvation
made ab aeterno by God but accomplished eschatologically in
time through man’s interior adherence to God.

Evaluation of the Bultmannian Hermeneutics

Bultmann’s desire to make the Gospel message relevant to
scientific man is in itself admirable. Certainly a greater under-
standing of the New Testament and a more profound heuristic
scholarship in theology and Scripture are always praiseworthy
and to be striven for. Moreover, Bultmann’s emphasis on the
vertical approach to the Lord of the Bible whereby man in his
reading of the Sacred Scriptures personally discovers God as
God kic et nunc and thus finds in this encounter his own au-
thentic existence is acceptable to traditional Christianity. A
great asset, too, is Bultmann’s effort to preserve the paradoxi-
cal aspects of God’s mysterious presence, His absolute tran-
scendence yet loving immanence and concern for the affairs of
men and the world.

But holy desires cannot be the ultimate criterion of the inter-
pretation of a theology of revelation. Reason guided by living
faith must judge the product presented by Bultmann. Unfortu-
nately, both these sources of truth reject Bultmann’s theology
of revelation as being objectively inaccurate and subjectively
arbitrary. Bultmann belittles the historical teachings and
deeds of Christ; his theory of scriptural interpretation dilutes
both the divine person and historical being of Jesus to the point
of suppressing Him as the God-Man and Savior of mankind. On
the other hand, he exalts above the Divine Savior a preaching
of salvation, a preaching which gets its efficacy in the last
analysis from man’s own interior decision to accept God. Jesus
and the Cross are mere occasions or symbols, not causes of
salvation. They merely point; they effect nothing. Thus Balt-
mann eliminates the objective historical (historisch) reality of
salvation. Moreover, the whole of Bultmann’s theory is founded
on a very questionable assertion: that the meaning of the Gos-
pel as traditionally taught cannot existentially win to its alle-
giance the modern, scientific mind. Bultmann, not being a
scientist himself, does not know this to be true, nor has he taken
the trouble to demonstrate this assertion as a truth. Moreover,

342 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

even if it were, per impossible, proven to be true that the mod-
ern scientific man is psychologically incapable of accepting
traditional theology, this criterion for the veracity of the Gos-
pel message would be an irrational, arbitrarily narrow and
highly subjective, not to say selective, norm. The truth of the
Gospel message will never be attained by polling the scientists.
The simple truth is that the study of theology and Scripture is
normally beyond the scope of their professional endeavors.
Moreover, Christ, in seeking to convince John the Baptist and
his followers that He was the true Messiah and teacher of truth,
appealed to the relevancy of His message for the masses of the
poor, not to its relevancy for the intellectually elite. “The poor
have the Gospel preached to them.”

Then too, in founding his existential interpretation of the
Gospel on a Heideggerian analysis of human existence, Bult-
mann seems to imply that Jesus came to make men merely
tough and honest—not saints. Jesus Himself seems to have
been in His highest perfection merely a Heideggerian man of
authentic existence way ahead of His time. Jaspers protests
this founding of the Gospel message on the desperate con-
science of Heidegger’s Dasein because such a consciousness is
neither representative of all men nor does it have universal
value in the many men who experience it; such a consciousness
is not true of man as man, but simply one form of man’s possi-
ble experiences. What man universally does experience Bult-
mann neglects in his theology. The history of mankind testifies
that man has inscribed in his depths an insatiable hunger for
God, a desire to possess God in a human yet divine Savior
through an encounter of reconciliation in faith. This consciou-
ness and hunger hold for scientist as well as for rustics. Indeed
the whole New Testament everywhere reveals this hunger for
God. St. Paul relates the death and Resurrection of Christ to all
men precisely in order to demonstrate their importance for
each man’s own destiny to physical resurrection and immortal
life after the temporal death of this body. Man is not merely
destined to death; he is destined to immortal resurrection and
transcendent, eternal reunion with God in the really risen
Christ. St. Augustine enunciated this eternal human truth in
his famous cry to God: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 343

Another unproven assertion in the Bultmannian theology of
revelation is the teaching that the Divine Power cannot irrupt
into human history with prodigies and miracles because such
deeds are incompatible with the scientific conception that the
world is ruled by rigorously deterministic, empirical laws. Jas-
pers asks, “Who gave Bultmann the right to speak in the name
of scientific thought?” Moreover, modern science does not
claim to have established cosmic determinism as a physically
demonstrated law that would inevitably exclude supernatural
intrusions into cosmic, human history. Indeed, modern science
admits that such meta-empirical problems are beyond the pur-
view of its disciplines. It admits also that it can say nothing
either way on this cosmic problem of physical determinism.

Then too, Bultmann’s total and radical demythologization of
the Gospel message atrophies man’s powers of soaring in won-
derment to the Transcendent and rejoicing in the mystical. His
Heideggerian hermeneutics beget doom and despair in Chris-
tians. For when the biblical message is drained of the “mag-
nalia et mirabilia Dei,” of the “supernatural interventions
and mighty deeds of God” in time on behalf of men, then Chris-
tianity as lived, suffered and died for in the two thousand years
of its existence is destroyed. And men will never adhere to a
Christianity whose message has lost its content and savor. St.
Paul warned the early Christians of the black despair that
would envelop their spirits if they believed those who were
preaching that neither Christ nor the dead had or ever would
rise. Apparently this warning was lost on Bultmann in his ea-
gerness to demythologize it. But it bears constant repeating in
our day of disbelief and especially as refutation of Bultman-
nian hermeneutics.

Now if Christ is preached as risen from the dead, how do
some among you say that there is no resurrection of the
dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither
has Christ risen; and if Christ has not risen, vain then is
our preaching, vain too is your faith... For if the dead do
not rise, neither has Christ risen; and if Christ has not
risen, vain is your faith, for you are still in your sins...
If with this life only in view we had hoped in Christ, we
are of all men the most to be pitied.?

3. 1 Cor. 15 : 12-19.

344 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

In the final analysis, Bultmann’s theology of revelation is a
drastic, dismal impoverishment of the Christian Faith. It ac-
complishes the very thing Bultmann had hoped to avoid, the
“shipwreck of Christianity” in the souls of men. Here then is
the baffling enigma of Rudolf Bultmann: He was striving to
make the preaching of the word of God relevant to twentieth-
century man. In order to accomplish this service he drained the
Gospel message of every inspiring marvel. He insisted that the
adventure of faith, instead of being a cascading irruption
downward from the Trinity of Infinite Truth in the Person of
the Incarnate Son striving with violently divine love to save
desperate man, was rather only man’s stoical decision to rise
from inauthentic to authentic existence. What a diluted, at-
tenuated adventure the quest for faith became in his thinking!
And yet he fully expected this pale stoical ideal to draw men in
greater numbers and with stronger bonds than the Christian
reality of the crucified, transfigured and gloriously risen
Christ! Malevez states that if Bultmann’s demythologization is
seen finally to be the true meaning of Christianity, then no
Christians ever existed before Bultmann’s or at least Luther’s
time. The fact is, he continues, that from the apostolic days of
St. Paul Christians always found the essence of their faith in
the profession that Jesus Christ, the God-Man, is the very
source of Life who died on the Cross and rose from the dead for
man’s justification and salvation.t Bultmann’s radical reduc-
tionism of the Gospel message leaves him with a theology that
is so banal and mediocre that it is incapable of alluring any
mind, much less elite minds. By this we mean that as a form of
theology and salvation message this teaching will be dismissed.
It may well, however, be accepted and has been accepted as an
alluring form of humanistic, atheistic rationalism. In this re-
spect, a reading of history should have taught Bultmann that
Greek and Roman geniuses had already been to the springs of
stoicism in their thirst for authentic existence. He might have
recalled that, upon the arrival of apostolic Christianity, mil-
lions of noble pagans abandoned stoicism to adhere to the
God-Man. After all, they were exchanging the lugubrious

4, L. Malevez, S.J., Le Message Chrétien et le Mythe, (Brussels: Desclée De
Brouwer, 1954), p. 122. N.b. The entire book is an excellent, balanced analysis
and refutation of Bultmann’s theology of revelation. We are greatly indebted
to its treatment in depth of this complex subject.

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 345

unnaturalness of stoicism for the transcendent liberty of the
Sons of God. In reality, then, it is Bultmann who returns to
irrelevant mythology when he expécts a Heideggerian stoicism
to win the hearts of the masses from the love of the God-Man.
Acontinuing, reflective contrast between true Christianity and
Bultmannian Christianity should be enough to dismiss the lat-
ter out of hand. Bultmann’s faith begets Heideggerian stoics,
the faith of the Apostles begets sons of God. Bultmann’s Cross
is a mere signpost, the Cross of the New Testament is an altar
of saving Sacrifice. Bultmann’s Resurrection is a verbal, empty
symbol of an imaginary conquest of death, the Resurrection of
the New Testament is “the first fruits” of man’s real conquest
of death in the Risen Christ. Bultmann is strangely silent about
the intimate nature of the Divine Family, about the rich vari-
ety of the divine attributes; all he can say is that God pardons
and saves, but there is nothing of the splendor and warmth of
the theology of the Trinity and the trinitarian ministrations of
the Divine Persons to the sanctification and salvation of man
and the universe. Moreover, there is nothing of the grandeur
of the theology of the final, eschatological realities of human
and world history in Bultmann’s compressed hermeneutics.
Bultmann’s determined anthropocentrism is what blinds his“
theology to divinely revealed truth, robs it of all wonderful
mysteries and denies it sacraments and other sanctifying reali-
ties. His theology suffers the cramps arising from frustrating
isolationism. For in Bultmann’s theology the Church is merely
a place where one, as an individual, can hear the preaching of
the Word of God and make his private, interior decision for or
against the Lord. In reality the Church is simply another pro-
fane place, not a temple of worship for the people of God. In-
deed listeners in the Church are not a Christian Community;
they are individuals accidentally gathered into a crowd. More-
over, the Church’s institutions, liturgy and sacraments do not
constitute a social sacred service in which the people of God
pray and adore together. All Church affliation, indeed all ec-
clesiclogy, is myth and magic for Bultmann. True to its Lu-
theran origins, Bultmann’s theology of revelation rejects holy
bonds among men and repeats Luther’s protestation that “the
entire world is merely profane territory.”®
5. Ibid. p. 159.

346 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

What a starkly cruel pauperization of the New Testament
has Bultmann’s theology of revelation turned out to be on quiet
reflection! It would be only natural to wonder how the masses
of the faithful have received it. Has Bultmann really gained the
modern mind with his new hermeneutics? Let us listen
to the testimony of a Congregational minister, the Rev. Harold
O. J. Brown who, as a student and eyewitness of German Chris-
tianity, reports on conditions in the German Church today.
Writing about the rise of a new, strong traditionalist movement
that is gaining a growing and committed following under the
Pauline battle cry of “No other Gospel!” the Rev. Dr. Brown
observes:

Modern theology has always professed a concern to make
Christianity relevant to the layman, and has encouraged
the laity to play a more active role in the Church and in
theology. But something seems to have gone wrong. The
layman who has not been influenced by radical theology,
whose heart is still with the “old time religion,” flocks to
the “No other Gospel!” movement, giving it a tremendous
lay participation. On the other hand, the emancipated lay-
men, whose religion has been “demythologized” by Bult-
mann and his cohorts, do not flock to laymen’s meetings to
spread the enlightenment on a lay level. They just stay at
home. Thus a paradox has arisen. Those who have talked
most about “making Christianity relevant to twentieth-
century man” have few disciples among twentieth-cen-
tury laymen, because the people they convince give up the
church, The Confessional Movement, by contrast, which
the radicals have derided for speaking the language of
another century, has a strong, committed and growing lay
following.®

This is not to say that among intellectual circles, especially
in the universities, Bultmann’s rationalistic hermeneutics is
not still quite influential. Its coherent, rational appeal has won
the academic mind away from the irrational neo-orthodoxy of
Barthian theologians. Brown reports as follows: “The real disci-
ples are being made not by the believing but irrational neo-
orthodox, but by the skeptical but rational Bultmann. Today
Bultmann’s friends and disciples dominate German theological

6. Harold O. J. Brown, “The Struggle for the German Church,” National
Review, April 8, 1969, pp. 334-337 and 349.

Bultmann: The Demythologized God 347

education (and exert a tremendous effect on both Protestant-
ism and Catholicism in the United States as well).”” That is
why we have treated Bultmann at some length in this chapter.
His hermeneutics lead straight to death-of-god atheism.

7. Ibid., p. 336.

CHAPTER XII

pA
e

DA
i

Tillich
The God of Contemporaneity

WHEREAS BONHOEFFER WAS REPRESENTED AS REJECT-
ing traditional theology as being too “religious” and Bultmann
departed from it because it was too “mythological,” Tillich
breaks with it because it is too “supernaturalist.” All three
claimed that the modern mind simply cannot accept a Gospel
message that is preached in the terminological trappings of the
past—as essentialist philosophy, immutable dogma and divine
irruptions into human history. Tillich belongs to that liberal
school of Protestantism that dissolves dogmas into vague reli-
gious experiences. Indeed, he was in the forefront of a liberal
protest against Barthian dogmatism. To this very hour Protes-
tant theology is agonizing over the controversies stimulated by
the demythologization of Bultmann and the secularization of
Tillich. Both are reductionist theologians par excellence. Both
insist that Christian faith becomes relevant to life only when. .
it is expressed in existentialist terms, though Bultmann alone
of the two rivets the Gospel message absolutely to Heideg-
gerian thought forms.

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 349

Tillich is proud of being in the theological tradition “of my
great teacher Rudolf Bultmann and. . .a product of the nine-
teenth century, which still taught me when I attended the uni-
versity of Berlin from 1904 to 1907.”! Thus, Tillich’s theology is
existentialist in temperament, deeply concerned with the hu-
man experiences in which consciousness of God is discovered.
Tillich is convinced that God is not discovered through rational
reflection on the cosmos. Discursive reason for him never ar-
rives at God. That is why natural theology is a sterile occupa-
tion. There is no dialectical ladder reaching from earth to
heaven, from man to God.

On the other hand, Tillich rejects the Barthian teaching that
God is found in faith alone. For man has an apologetic hunger
to find and feed on God. In the sense that it asks the universe
about God, natural theology is asking the right question. But the
universe remains mute and the intellect frustrated along this
avenue of investigation. As far as Tillich is concerned, the task
of theology is one of correlation. Theology must explore man’s
existential situation and the human questions evoked therein,
together with what men as a rule find thinkable and acceptable
in this situation. But above all, theology must compare these
human questions and their humanly acceptable solutions with
the understanding of God contained or implied in the Gospel
message. When the individual. comprehends that his existen-
tial queries are dramatically related to the Christian biblical
understanding of God, then, and only then, does he attain exis-
tential awareness of God. For consciousness of God, theological
comprehension of the human predicament is never anything
beyond the existential encounter of individual with God. Ra-
tional, discursive, supernatural, historically accurate, object-
like awareness of God is simply beyond man’s powers. Thus, for
Tillich, belief in God is brought down from a level of superior
knowledge by the light of faith to the natural level of normal
knowledge by concern for moral seriousness. God and faith are
the fruit of crisis situations.

But what are the serious concerns of man’s life? Man’s being
and environment are essentially marred by finitude and
relativity. Awareness of the fickle existential fragility of hu-
man existence wrings from his soul a host of anxiety questions.
Why do I exist? Why does anything exist? Why such universal

1. Paul Tillich, Ultimate Concern (London: D. Mackenzie Brown, 1965), p. 37.

350 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

death, frustration, loss of identity, fraternal hostility? What is
the meaning of a human existence which is so imperfect, so
limited, so destructive? Eventually, reacting under these ago-
nizing conditions, man is forced to ask the last, most serious
question. What is the ultimate ground, the ultimate concern of
my existence? What must I do to become myself, to become a
“New Being?”

In answering this question of Being, of man’s most serious
concern, Tillich is determined to eschew any abstractness. It is
true that according to him God is another name for the ground
of man’s being. But this does not mean He is the God of human
activity, ideas, formulas or human judgments. Such represen-
tations infringe on the transcendence of God; they would
reduce God to the status of an object. Whereas in the experi-
ence of ultimate concern man gets beyond subject-object rela-
tionships. God cannot be known, as objects can, in scientific
knowledge. God is beyond science in that he is the hidden God,
Deus absconditus, forever meta-empirical. Because He can
never be known as an object of knowledge, God can never be
known as an agent irrupting into history with an incarnate
human nature and performing marvelous deeds or wondrous
miracles. In the realm of ultimate concern one is accepted by
God; the action for man is passive, allowing ultimate concern
to seize him. There is no such action as an active seizure of
truth on the part of man. Man, on that level of experience,
never knows if he has attained the true answers to his an-
guished questions. He is simply aware that answers have been
given to his ultimate concerns. This awareness of answers re-
ceived to ultimate questions is very similar to Bultmann’s
awareness of the attainment of authentic existence in man’s
interior encounter with God. But Tillich calls his awareness the
experience of the “New Being.”

Now the New Being is attained in Jesus. But Tillich places
the true message of the New Being not in man’s unquestioning
acceptance of the New Testament as the historical Word of God
but in man’s acceptance of the symbolic meaning of the histori-
cal Jesus who merely manifests in Himself, or is the occasion
for, the manifestation of the New Being in other men. Thus
Tillich, faithful pupil of Bultmann, demonstrates a great skep-
ticism about the historical veracity of the Gospels and insists

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 351

that what is important in our experience of the New Being in
Jesus is not historical facts in any sense or degree. Once again,
as in Bultmann, we find an exclusive stress on the individual’s
personal existentialist experience as the sole means for getting
at the truth of the Gospels. For Tillich distinguishes and sepa-
rates the revelatory value of the New Testament from its his-
torical value; he minimizes the. historicity of the New
Testament events and founds his faith on his own arbitrary
reinterpretation of these events. He follows his master slav-
ishly in believing it to be possible to separate historical facts
from their meanings.

In the last analysis, then, just as for Bultmann so for Tillich,
the needs of the modern existentialist mentality verify theolog-
ical data. Theological truth becomes as relative, fickle and
changeable as contemporary man’s social needs or individual
cravings. On the other hand, however, if history were impor-
tant, then Christian faith would depend upon it in some serious
degree. But, by previous assertion, ultimate concern, alias God,
for that is Tillich’s new name for God, is meta-historical. It is
only by this previous arrangement that God’s transcendence
can be maintained and faith saved from the probabilities and
vagaries of history. It appears, then, that faith, though appar-
ently saved from the fickleness of history, nevertheless now
succumbs to the more violent buffetings of psychological crises.
Tillich’s refusal to permit faith to be born, struggle, survive and
mature in the testing events of history and, particularly within
the salvation events of the life, death and resurrection of the
God-Man, reveals in him a blinding bias against historical ob-
jectivity, indeed against all objectivity in man’s relations to
God. Such historical agnosticism reduces the religious meaning
of thousands of years of history to its meaning at this present
moment, in this interior incident hidden within the soul. This
moment, this event, any moment, any event may embody the
encounter of salvation. Again, as in Bultmann, Christ is not the
source, nor the beginner and finisher of our faith and salvation;
He is merely the symbolic occasion and reminder of how the
attainment of our New Being is a real possibility and can be-
come an actuality.

It follows, then, that in the Gospels everything narrated in an
objective manner about Jesus Christ is merely symbolic. It is

352 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

true that symbolical or mythological language does represent
man’s ultimate concern, for symbols have the power of de-
bouching into vast areas of being beyond themselves. Yet as
regards the specifically Christian mythological symbolism, Til-
lich explains the sacrifice of Jesus the man in this manner.
Jesus the man of Nazareth, because He offered Himself on the
Cross for others, felt Himself to become and was called by His
followers “the Messiah or the Anointed One, the Christ,” the
one awaited by all nations in which the New Being, divinely
healed, would enjoy a world free from the sin of estrangement
from oneself, others and God. In answering a question of a
student who wanted to know whether the uniqueness of Christ
consisted in His role as a center of history or in the symbolic
picture of Him presented by the Gospels, Tillich expounded his
doctrine on Jesus in these words:

... I refer now to everything we read about Jesus in the
Gospels and the epistles of the New Testament. They all
contribute to an image. This image, of course, changes in
the biblical literature itself, and changes again and again
in every century of Christianity. The reality behind it is in
no historical case identical with the image. In the New
Testament, all the images share one quality in which they
are identical: they call Jesus the Christ. In this, all letters
and all Gospel stories are identical. And from these are
derived many special events, as I would call them, or in
terms of literary criticism, “anecdotes.” They are not a
biography; they are anecdotes that demonstrate some-
thing. Something is shown either about Jesus as the Christ
or about things which the early groups of followers had to
know—how to pray, for instance. The event includes both
the fact and the reception. The fact. has the power of im-
pressing itself on the disciples in such a way that histori-
cal images occur. And these images are very different. If
we compare the Mark image and the John image—the
image in the first and the fourth Gospels—they are, in
many respects and in the whole vision, contradictory. The
man who spoke and worked and acted in Mark is not the
same as the one who spoke and worked and acted in John.
John is a reinterpretation of the life of Jesus in the light
of later problems. It is not even so much a biography as the
first Gospels. They, at least, use anecdotes with historical
backgrounds. John is a theological book, and therefore is
best for theology because it answers problems. I very often
use it, not because I think that here I have the authentic

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 353

words of Jesus— don’t believe there is any authentic word
of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel—but because I know that
here the meaning of the Christ, the meaning of the funda-
mental statement, “This is the Christ,” is brought out in
the light of later problems. And these problems are also
our problems. Therefore, I often feel, like Luther, that this
is really the chief Gospel, not because it gives us an histori-
cal picture, but because it depicts in words the power in
this event.”

We see, therefore, that Tillich in his determination to ac-
comodate the Gospel message to the “problems of our day”
believes he is imitating what John the Evangelist did with the
Gospel message for the problems of his day. In desupernatural-
izing the New Testament and accomodating its message to
man’s problematic, existential, modern situation, Tillich
drained Christian mysteries of their divine substance, secula-
rizing them all along the line. In his hands, belief in God and
Christ, as handed down by thousands of years of Judaeo-Chris-
tian written and living tradition, is evacuated of all historical,
supernatural substance or content. Man’s fall is diluted to
mean his creatureliness; sin, the mystery of iniquity, the
offense against the infinitely good God is attenuated to mean
merely existential estrangement. Moreover, in the words of
Mascall, Tillich’s assertion that “the grace of God justifies man
not only without reference to his merits but even without refer-
ence to his faith seems to drive the doctrine of justification
beyond the point of paradox to that of absurdity.”* All the clas-
sic, traditional truths—creation, the Fall, Reconciliation, Sal-
vation, the Cross, Resurrection, the Kingdom of God, the
Trinity—all of them are mere symbols. They have permanent
value and Tillich would hate to part with them. But they must
all undergo radical reinterpretation if they are to become ac-
ceptable to the modern world.

How Many Gospel Messages Are there in Paul Tillich?

The instrument of profound study, reflection and comparison
with historical deeds, documents and living traditions of Reve-
lation is one necessary means for assessing the veracity of a

2. Ibid, pp. 154-155.

3. E. L. Mascall, Tke Secularization of Christianity (New York: Holt, Rine-
hart and Winston, 1965), p. 14.

354 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Christian theology. Another means, of course, is the constant
teaching of the Magisterium of the true Church founded
by Christ as “the pillar and ground of truth” and guided by
the Holy Spirit to all truth. But Christ did not leave the sim-
ple sheep of his flock without a daily, more practical means
for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic Christianity.
It is the criterion of performance, of the record, of results at-
tained, especially of the metaphysical and moral quality of
the results. “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, neither
can a bad tree produce good fruit.” On its effects, then, let
us seek to answer this question: “What is the secularizing
theology of Tillich doing for the faith and religious life of
Christians?”

In the Eighth Dialogue of a seminar conducted by Dr. Tillich
at the University of California in the spring of 1963 and pub-
lished, after being read and approved by him, as a book entitled
Ultimate Concern in London in 1965, student members of the
seminar, speaking through a faculty representative, ques-
tioned Dr. Tillich as follows:

Professor: Dr. Tillich, are you not a dangerous man? You
make paradoxical statements which weaken people’s
confidence in symbols and liturgies and churches. And you
tend to destroy their belief, without giving them anything
to replace it. Now you are the most influential theologian
of the twentieth century, but are you not primarily an
apostle to the intellectuals, speaking in their language?
When you broadcast your concepts, do you not harm those
people who are unable to comprehend, and will only
misapply your ideas?*

In answer to this startling and refreshingly frank question,
Tillich defends his preaching and writing at great length and
with the utmost candor. Here we can only indicate his main
arguments, exhorting the reader to enjoy the entire original
reply at his leisure. Tillich first sets the historical context of
his theological work by comparing his mission to that of his
two great contemporaries—Karl! Barth and Rudolf Bultmann.
Barth courageously fought Nazism through his neo-orthodox
Christianity, saving liberal Germanic, indeed all European,

4. Paul Tillich, Ultimate Concern, p. 188.

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 355

Protestantism from the fate of Nazification or at least of
nationalization into a Germanic Christianity. Barth’s neo-
orthodoxy was triumphant with the defeat of Nazism. But the
post-war Christian European intelligentsia were theologically
abandoned and slipping alarmingly into secularism and un-
belief because they could not accept the overpowering God and
Gospel of Barthianism. Both of these neglected the life of the
intellect. At this precise moment, Rudolf Bultmann came for-
ward with his famous work on demythologization to save for
Christianity those “thinking and doubting people” who could
accept his collapsed New Testament message because it stimu-
lated the intellect. The modern intellectual was pleased with a
faith received from God and a salvation that consisted in the
liberating awareness of authentic existence achieved in Christ.
But, in the opinion of Tillich, Bultmann had been too radical;
he had, by jettisoning Christian symbols and myths, led many
Christians into the spiritual wilderness of religious skepticism.
Tillich saw himself as the prophet sent to these darkened souls;
his mission was to recall them to Christianity through a Gospel
message that salvaged symbols and myths but reinterpreted
them in a non-literal, modern, existential sense.

Now Tillich admits that his mission as prophet and preacher
impaled him on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, his
work as a prophet-theologian oriented him through his writ-
ings to appeal to “those who ask questions” by teaching them
the existential, demythologized, collapsed, reinterpreted mes-
sage of the Gospel. For it was his conviction that the intelli-
gentsia would accept only this and no other Christianity. On
the other hand, Tillich’s work as pastor-preacher oriented him
in his sermons to appeal to “primitive believers” who had no
doubts about traditional theology. They would not stomach a
demythologized Gospel message. How did Tillich resolve his
dilemma? There can be no substitute for his own explanation.
He replies:

Dr. Tillich: I presuppose in my theological thinking the
entire history of Christian thought up until now, and I
consider the attitude of those people who are in doubt or
estrangement or opposition to everything ecclesiastical
and religious, including Christianity. And I have to speak
to them. My work is with those who ask questions, and for

356 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

them I am here. For the others, who do not, I have the great
problem of tact. Of course, I cannot avoid speaking to them
because of a fear of becoming a stumbling block for primi-
tive believers. When I am preaching a sermon—and then
I am quite aware of what I am doing—I speak to people
who are unshaken in their beliefs and in their acceptance
of symbols, in a language which will not undermine their
belief. And to those who are actually in a situation of doubt
and are even being torn to pieces by it, I hope to speak in
such a way that the reasons for their doubts and other
stumbling blocks are taken away. On this basis I speak also
to a third group, one which has gone through these two
stages and is now able again to hear the full power of the
message, freed from all difficulties. I can speak to those
people, and they are able to understand me, even when I
use the old symbols, because they know that I do not mean
them in a literal sense.
... Iam trying to interpret the Christian message in a new
way to them... I believe that it would be hard for you to
: find in my sermons any directly negative statements, even
against literalism. I simply restrain myself in that situa-
tion. For instance, the resurrection stories: I do not criti-
cize in my sermons the highly poetic symbolic story of the
empty tomb, although I would so in my theology and have
done it in my books. But I speak of what happened to Paul
and the other apostles, as Paul describes it in I Corinthians
15. Now that is the preaching method I would recommend
for all sermons.5

This explanation is most revealing for it indicates clearly
that Dr. Tillich, “in trying to interpret the Christian message
in a new way for thinking and doubting people,” in reality
creates a message radically contradictory to the traditionally
orthodox Gospel he preaches to “primitive believers.” There
are, then, two mutually exclusive Gospel messages in Tillich’s
teachings. On Sundays Tillich is a traditionalist pastor feeding
the flock orthodox symbols and doctrines, though for the most
part his listeners cannot suspect that their preacher “does not
mean them in a literal sense.” At other religious services, such
as funerals, Tillich again, in order not to disturb the simple
faith of the bereaved and their relatives and friends who really
believe in a literally physical resurrection of the body because
of their belief in the really risen Christ, prays and preaches in

5. Ibid., pp. 191, 193, 194.

z

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 357

an orthodox manner, though, of course, his own religious con-
victions contradict what he is saying. He tells us that with
primitive believers he gives the aid and comfort he is expected
to give. In his own words: “In such moments the question of
literalism or nonliteralism does not exist, for we have the
power of the word... I talk with children on the level they can
understand.”®

On the other hand, in theological tracts directed at twentieth-
century minded intellectuals, Tillich “undercuts and destroys
the primitivism of religious literalism.” Again in his own
words: “I try to recreate the old realities on another basis.””
Tillich complains that “primitive believers” are stunted in
their historical development of on-going, relevant theology.
They still really believe that “the word of God” is just what
orthodox theologians of the year 1620 wrote. They think that
this is the word of God for all times, although actually it is only
the word of the theologians of the year 1620, in Germany and
in Holland mostly—only that.”® Contemporaneity is now ad-
vanced and universalized as the new norm and criterion for
discovering the valid message of the Gospels. What is histori-
cally relevant to modern concerns reveals the content of the
word of God. What does the new criterion say of the witnessing
of the Apostles who, as men on the scene, sealed with their
blood and lives their teachings with regard to the historically
objective reality of the salvation events centered in Christ, the
Son of God? Tillich, the revolutionist theologian, using the new
criterion, cavalierly dismisses the testimony of the Apostles as
fantasy. Obviously their supernaturalist scheme of salvation
sprang from what these for the most part primitive fishermen
imagined happened to Jesus in the violent times of His life and
death. Not what Jesus said and did, but what these primitive
believers fancied He said and did is narrated in the four Gos-
pels. Such legends of divine irruptions into time and narrations
of abnormal events are embarrassing to twentieth-century in-
tellectuals. Obviously the Bible is the source of truth, but only
the expurgated edition of the Bible expounded by the radical
theologians. Of course, Christians who “in a literalistic atti-

6. Ibid., p. 194.
7. Ibid., p. 192.
8. Ibid., p. 192.

358 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tude” still cling to the visions, myths, symbols and abnormal
events narrated by the Apostles, are to be treated with tact and
toleration.

This contradictory, dualistic, “one other Gospel” teaching of
Tillich defies comment, for it leaves the true believer speech-
lessly amazed, but the effort must be made for the sake of
“thinking and doubting people.” One is prone to admire in Til-
lich his sensitivity for the unshared beliefs and feelings of his
primitive listeners. Certainly Tillich’s tolerance of their back-
wardness and patience with their literalness display the pru-
dence and civility of a gentleman. But what must come through
as appalling to the man of reason—believer or unbeliever—is
that Tillich apparently does not even suspect the sheer incon-
sistency, not to say dishonesty, of his dual role. He seems uncon-
cerned about the contradictory falsity of at least one of these
Gospel messages. Now tolerance and tact are not virtues of the
intellect; they are social attitudes, moral virtues if you wish,
toward others. But when tolerance and tact are practiced to
disguise and deny the truth to others who have a right to it, they
then are, in reality, the vices of dishonesty and betrayal. Now,
leaving aside the subjective moral consciousness of Tillich, a
reasonable man can surely analyze his objective conduct dis-
passionátely.

When writing for intellectuals and revealing what he actu-
ally believes, Tillich is certainly behaving honestly, for he is
accurately representing his beliefs or lack of them. On the part
of the reader, there may be disagreement with the ideas of the
writer and the reader will reject those ideas as false. For love
of truth, the fundamental virtue of the mind, must of its very
nature be intolerant of what it sees as falsity. But intolerance
of a writer’s false ideas need not proceed to intolerance of his
person. It need not flow over into overt, hostile action against
the writer. Of course, under certain special circumstances, in-
tellectual intolerance of the false ideas of a person may have
to proceed to social intolerance of his person, especially where
the person is translating his ideas into actions that are overtly
assaulting the common good of society. For example, for a long
time the Christian West was intellectually intolerant of the
theories of Hitler and yet he went on writing and propagandiz-
ing them over the world. But as his teachings were incarnated
into a military machine that assaulted all free institutions, the

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 359

West was constrained to tolerate the existence of Hitler and his
system of thought no longer. Quite reasonably and justly it
proceeded to destroy both.

Now this may seem like an academic digression but it is not.
Let us look at Tillich’s mission as a pastor, his role of preacher
to primitive believers. While teaching his Sunday faithful the
literal interpretation of the Gospel, Tillich, for all his sensitive
feeling for the flock, was de facto deceiving the faithful. He
was denying them the truth as he believed it and was officially
sent to teach it. Hence his civility or tact or prudence in not
showing his true convictions was merely a perverted simula-
crum of true charity. For true charity, first and foremost,
moves men to the mutual sharing of the trith that expands
their freedom. Now there were two honest courses open to Til-
lich the preacher. First, he could have chosen to teach openly
what his true convictions about the Gospel message were, risk-
ing thereby scandalizing his listeners and being dismissed by
them. Because of the scandal to faith it would have caused, this
course of action would not have been prudent or socially tact-
ful, but it would have been honest. Second, realizing that he had
lost the faith that was adhered to by his listeners and recogniz-
ing that as an official preacher he could no longer share what
he no longer held, he should have given up his preaching office.
He should have refused to pose as if he were still of the reli-
gious persuasions of his listeners. This conduct would have
been an exercise of both charity and honesty to himself and his
congregations.

What can we say about his dualistic role in conducting other
religious functions, such as communion or funeral services?
For Tillich to justify a performance that simulated adherence
to orthodoxy with the words, “In such moments the question of
literalism. or nonliteralism does not exist, for we have the
power of the word,” is to my mind one of the most tragic exam-
ples of self-delusion through the use of rationalistic, escapist
jargon. Let us take the example he uses himself, the preaching
and praying of orthodox doctrine at the funeral service. To
indicate that the werds of the service, “I am the resurrection
and life; he who believes in me, though he be dead, shall yet
live,” do not literally mean that the believer in Christ resting
in death before his sorrowing family shall rise again to life like
Christ, is to reduce the whole service to a sacrilegious sham and

360 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to desecrate the sorrowing faith and hope of the grieving
family. Far from “recreating old realities on another basis,” as
Tillich claims he is doing as he deliteralizes orthodox Chris-
tianity, the old reality of a religious funeral service that ra-
diated transcendent meaning, hope and consolation now has no
basis in fact at all. For if the basis in fact for the biblical
funeral service for Christians—Christ’s real resurrection—has
all along been merely a basis in fiction, then the traditional
burial service itself is as vain, empty and sterile as the fantasy
of the resurrection of Christ Himself. Nor is this dismal situa-
tion saved by the vacuous assertion “for we have thé power of
the word.” What power has a word that represents no luminous
reality outside its mere vocal formulation? If the traditional
burial service which is literally and desperately adhered to by
the faithful as an augur of real resurrection in their sorrowful
confrontation with death is only a performance of vox et prae-
terea nthil—words and nothing more—for Pastor Tillich, then
it becomes impossible to understand how Tillich has not lost all
Christian faith, since the rock-bottom foundation of all tradi-
tional Christianity is the reality of the Resurrection. The suspi-
cion is aroused that Tillich is merely using language to mask
an agnostic vacuum. Other theologians have come to a more
brutal conclusion, placing Tillich among the nonbelievers.
Alasdair Macintyre, in comparing the theological doctrines on
God of Bultmann, Robinson and Tillich, writes in his contribu-
tion to Tke Honest To God Debate: “Just as Bultmann’s view of
the New Testament points towards scepticism, so does Tillich’s
analysis of the doctrine of God. It seems that Dr. Robinson is not
alone as a theological atheist.”® Mascall thinks this judgment
against Tillich and Robinson may go too far. Yet he quite per-
ceptively points out that as regards Robinson’s thought, “there
are trends in his thought which if he followed them out consis-
tently would certainly issue either in atheism or in sheer indif-
ference as to whether God existed or not.” It is my opinion
that the same assessment can be validly made of Tillich’s
teachings.

9. Alasdair Macintyre, “God and the Theologians,” in Tke Honest to God

Debate, ed. by David L. Edwards (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1963),
p. 220.

10. E. L. Mascall, The Secularization of Of Christianity, Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, (New York: 1965), p. 180.

Tillich: The God of Contemporaneity 361

As we saw in the case of the German Church, when treating
of Bultmann, demythologized theology is keeping twentieth-
century Christians indifferent, stay-at-home agnostics, if not
atheists. Now we find that in the American Church, where
Tillich’s greatest work and influence was accomplished, delit-
eralized theology leaves the faithful bored and unconcerned—
despite the call to ultimate concern—about God and Christian-
ity. In an interview with Dr. Tillich, whom he calls “by far the
most notable and original (although not the most comprehensi-
ble) articulator of a liberal view of theology,” Duncan Norton-
Taylor writes:

Stripped of all else, the question the liberal theologians
are asking is the old one that has time and again sundered
the Christian Church: Who was Jesus?

Would the liberals say that Jesus was the Son of God? I
inguired tentatively of Professor Tillich. It was a few
weeks before his death. He was perched on the edge of a
bed in a Manhattan hotel room, where he was waiting for
a sculptor who was going to do a bust of him.

Tillich: Both answers to the question—whatever I say—
would be wrong. I’m trapped. So I must ask, What do you
mean by Son of God? Now (triumphantly) you're trapped.
The trap, I see, was that the liberals in rejecting the con-
cept of Christ as the Son of God would be rejecting a meta-
phor that is useful; but accepting the statement meant
taking literally the whole of the Apostles’ Creed.'!

Two weeks before his return to his Creator and Dr. Paul
Tillich, famous theologian and scholar, remains obsessed more
with preventing himself from being trapped by questions about
traditional theology through laying traps for his traditional
questioners, than he is about the substantive, liberating sub-
limity of God’s love as revealed in the traditional message of
the Gospels. The dedicated Christian reader of this incident
cannot help but be saddened by, in the apt words of David
Jenkins, “the scandalous poverty” of Tillichian theology, sev-
ered as it is from the exhaustless treasuries of theological gold
to be found in the vast Scriptural studies of the Churches, the
Fathers and Councils of East and West, the great mystics and

11. Duncan Norton-Taylor, “What on Earth is Happening to Protestantism,”
Fortune Magazine, December 1965, pp. 170-231.

362 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

saints. Perhaps the serious Christian is irritated even more by
the worldly artfulness with which the revolutionary theolo-
gians avoid precisioning and thus sharing their own religious
convictions. Moreover, in America, sincere Christians are
openly registering their protests against a tree of theology that
produces such bad fruit. Norton-Taylor goes on to report that
“the Protestant clergyman is confronted finally from the pews
by people who aren’t paying much attention. They aren’t be-
cause he isn’t saying much from the pulpit.” In the final anal-
ysis, Tillich can be viewed as a modern Titan who conceived the
adventure of faith as a sortie from earth to heaven, an abduc- F
tion of God from His throne up there and His incarceration into
human concerns down here. Behold your God is your ultimate
concern, your ground of being, men are being taught. But men
can care less about a God as lifeless, loveless and meaningless
as an immanentized ground of being. For a trapped God can
-only have trapped subjects. Tillich himself is the foremost ex- '
ample of this captivity to what is relevant only to the contem-
porary moment; he is always on the defensive, always parrying
imaginary blows. Men are seeking the God who freely camie
down from above in love in order to liberate them from the
shabbiness of the fallen existential condition. The true, the
traditional message of the Gospels once liberated a pagan , ;
world enslaved to the decadent powers of time. Today this mes-
sage maintains the power to liberate those who have trapped
themselves in large numbers in the existential world of Tillich-
ian agnosticism and scientific atheism.
12. Ibid., p. 231.

CHAPTER XIII

Robinson:

The Depersonalized God

THE BISHOP OF WOOLWICH, JOHN A. T. ROBINSON, IN HIS
controversial book Honest To God, published in 1963, states
that the radical theologies of three great contemporary Protes-
tant writers have so moved him that all his writings represent
“his thinking aloud, struggling to think other people’s thoughts
after them, yet unable to claim to have understood all that Iam
trying to transmit.” The three Protestant writers and their
works are: Tillich, The Shaking Of The Foundations, Bonhoef-
fer, Letters And Papers From Prison and Bultmann, New Testa-
ment And Mythology.’ Four years later, in his book. Explora-
tion Into God, Robinson reassesses what he did in that
theological bombshell: “But I am coming to believe that the
holding of them together may .. . be the distinctive contribution
of Honest To God. And perhaps this is also the characteristi-
cally Anglican contribution to the present theological debate—

1, John A. T. Robinson, Honest To God (Philadelphia: The Westminister
Press, 1963), pp. 21-24.

364 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to refuse the logical either-or and to attempt a creative synthe-
sis.”

What is Robinson trying to harmonize into a creative synthe-
sis? They are two theories of religious significance with oppo-
site consequences. He admits that he was trying to synthesize
the ideas of Tillich and those of Bonhoeffer, with the thinking
of Bultmann as a sort of bridge between them. Now these for-
mer two have their sharp differences. For Tillich all reality was
religious, for Bonhoeffer everything was secular; Tillich
focused on ultimate concern as God, Bonhoeffer on penultimate
questions; Tillich systematized his theology of crisis, Bon-
hoeffer was an anti-systematizer. Why the effort to whip these
opposed men together with such theological wizardry? Be-
cause, according to Robinson, these radical theologians have
more in common than in dissent, in their novel approaches to
the reality of God. How successful has Robinson been in his
synthesis?

When one attempts to synthesize opposites while banning the
logic of either-or and the exclusiveness of true or false, then, of
course, consistency of thinking becomes impossible. Conse-
quently, it is not really surprising that there.are revealed in the
Bishop of Woolwich’s writings not one but two or three Dr.
Robinsons. There is the Robinson who would like to remain
orthodox, yet lead a “reluctant revolution.” There is the Robin-
son who, in order to “re-locate and re-center the God of out
there, up there back in the world and history, would secularize,
de-supernaturalize the whole of Christianity, plunging down-
ward into the nature of man and the cosmos to attain a new
type of transcendence. Finally, there is the Robinson who, after
“clearing the decks” of the false traditional images and concep-
tions of God, creates his own religion as something better than
Christianity with its “God beyond God.” Now this last Robinson
tells us that he “is prepared to be an agnostic with the agnos-
tics, even an atheist with the atheists.” to gain all to this faith.3
Now the three Robinsons—there are really more, but it is im-
possible to reveal them all here—move from one theological
position to another with such startling dexterity and contradic-

2. John A. T. Robinson, Exploration With God (London; SCM Press, 1967), p.
76.
3. J. A. T. Robinson, Honest To God, p. 127.

Robinson: The Depersonalized God 365

tory boundings that the reader is treated to a muddled conger-
ies of theologically incoherent positions.

Robinson, in his genuine desire to Christianize the secular
has succeeded only in secularizing the Christian. Bultmann
had demythologized the Gospels and dissolved their miracles.
This was not radical enough for Robinson’s tastes. God and
miracles must be secularized; that is, explained in a non-reli-
gious sense. Transcendence had traditionally meant an adher-
ence of the whole person to the Tri-Personal God dwelling
above, beyond, as well as being present to the world. Robinson,
following his master Tillich, insists that man must rinse his
being absolutely clean of every vestige of traditional, supernat-
ural theology. Even the word “God” will have to be discarded
as no longer useful. For God is not a person but “infinite depth;”
He is Tillich’s “ground of being.” Thus a new form of transcen-
dence is formulated to displace the old. Now transcendence is
preserved in “the finite world which points beyond itself.” But
the pertinent question flys from one’s lips: “Points to what?”
Robinson answers that this is Tillich’s great contribution to
theology, his feat of detaching transcendence from a projected,
supernatural world up there and riveting transcendence to this
self-surpassing world down here. But the question remains,
since it was not answered but skirted, “Toward what does a
self-transcendent world arise?” Robinson's position of imma-
nentism is undermined for it cannot harmonize with the tran-
scendence he so urgently desires. A world that points upward
at nothing beyond itself is in reality a world plunged into the
void of the Absolute Absurd.

Having immanentized transcendence, Robinson realized he
was open to the charge of teaching pantheism. In order to clear
himself of this charge, he first sets his own position in relation
to the two theories of history that are competing for the adher-
ence of Christians. There is the Teilhardian evolutionary the-
ory that sees the entire universe rushing in expanding progress
to a cosmic, collective rendezvous with God in the Omega
Point. On the other hand, there is the humanistic dialectic in-
ward, that sees the process of secularization as a dynamic de-
scent away from the illusion of God toward the achievements
of a humanity “come of age” in a religionless Christianity.
Once again the synthesizing Robinson would harmonize the

366 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

best in these opposing systems, producing a marriage between
inward secularization and the outward evolutionary replace-
ment of traditional Christianity. Such a synthesis would have
the great advantage of discarding the dualistic world of tradi-
tional theism and integrating reality in natural oneness. Again
this synthesis would achieve Tillich’s “ecstatic naturalism,”
ie., contain God in the depth of a “shot-silk universe,” allowing
nature and man, together with God, to do anything and create
all possible history. Thirdly, this synthesis would impose uni-
versal silence on speech and discussion about God that is not
pertinent to God’s immanent relationships with man and the
universe. Fourthly, this synthesis would supress all antithetic
exclusivisms between religions. The dividing wall of either-or,
true-false, good-evil, yes-no would be demolished among all
men. A new essence of Christianity would thus arise across the
former, falsifying, trivial demarcations.

Robinson claims that his own synthesis, as the third alterna-
tive theory of history, escapes the traps of pantheism. He gives
his system the philosophical name of panentheism. Now
panentheism rejects pantheism for the same reasons that
Christianity rejects it. Pantheism is impersonal, impassive,
aesthetic, prone to historical quietism, being unconcerned
about pain, evil, injustice or history in any dimension. Its move
toward God as being and truth is doomed to the tragedy of
personal obliteration. As for his panentheistic synthesis, Robin-
son claims that it re-centers God as the Great Incognito at the
heart of all things, not absorbing them, but revealing Himself
in and through all, even in evils, inhumanities and moral cor-
ruptions.

For the purpose of providing an incarnate illustration of the
sublime secular sainthood achievable through the practice of
panentheism in real life, Robinson quotes generously from the
ex-communist Rumanian writer Petru Dumitriu’s novel Incog-
nito. Robinson admits that, in his development to date from his
Honest To God skepticism about traditional theology, this
novel has influenced him as strongly “as any of the more purely
theological influences to which I have found myself respond-
ing.” Here I will summarize the essence of the prolonged pas-
sages quoted. The scene represents a prisoner who has been
tortured into a dehumanized hulk of humanity, but who saves

Robinson: The Depersonalized God 367

for himself the meaning of the whole universe by his individ-
ual response of love in the very teeth of cosmic and human
brutality. The message of human love and goodness that stirs
his soul below the piercing screams of his rent body is given as
follows:

This love welling up within me to justify the world by
loving and forgiving it, comes from some unknown source
that is not me but thou ... It is God! How address him? O
Universe? O Heap? O Whole? ... Dear Father? Dear Com-
rade? Do I call Lord the air I breathe or the lungs with
which I breathe it? God is perfect, yet terrible and evil; He
is all things, yet confines himself to none... All things,
events, persons, faces are the incognitos of God... God is
composed of volcanoes, cancerous growths and tape-
worms... That makes me an atheist because I irreverently
reduce God to evil as well as to good, to matter as well as
to thought? I answer that the hard task of life is to love a
world that tortures, to forgive, even bless, it, for this is one
of the faces of God, sad and terrifying. God is not found in
labelled religions or structured churches; labels are super-
flous; institutional structures kill. God is found in the fel-
lowship of the secret discipline of love which constitutes
the invisible leaven of the Kingdom. The divinity of Christ
consists in his deep, intense love of everything—good, evil,
perfect, imperfect. Christ is the first of a future mankind
wherein a mutation of human hearts will in the end cause
the Kingdom of God—the Kingdom, Tao, Agarttha—to de-
scend among men.‘

Robinson, Anglican bishop whose office it is to defend, ex-
plain and propagate the Christian faith, accepts this avowedly
non-Christian naturalism, made out of whole cloth, whole-
heartedly. He tells us that “comment on it would be an anti-
climax.” And then he proceeds to praise this “theology of the
latent rather than of the manifest Church” as a new “diaphany
of the divine,” even twisting the words of St. Paul in order to
liken it to “the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ.” But if Robinson will not comment on this mélange of
chaotic emotionalism parading as the message of the Kingdom
of God, the concerned Christian must. Whereas in Honest To

4. J. A. T. Robinson, Exploration Into God, (London: SCM Press, 1967), pp.
88-92.

368 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

God Robinson expressed his complete indifference to the truth
or falsity of traditional theism, here in Exploration Into God,
he abandons completely any belief in Christianity, using the
medium of the novel—a dubious instrument for theological
precision—to reduce the traditional content and grandeur of
Revelation to the rhetorical rantings of a tortured prisoner who
sings an idolatrous hymn to the universe. The verbal denial of
pantheism does not save Robinson from trapping himself in the
reality. God is everything and everything is God. “It is the abil-
ity to take up evil into God and transform it that is the most
striking—and shocking—feature of this theology,” is his adver-
tisement for allegiance to this, his theology. Of course, the real-
ity is that the Bishop degrades God, identifying Him with evil
and immanentizing Him in a brutal world. But even more, that
last sentence of his reveals a serious psychological sickness at
the heart of the Bishop’s thought. He is enamored with the
“shocking feature” of this theology. The Bishop has a history of
proceeding on his theological itinerary from shock to shock, al]
of these shocks administered, supposedly as therapeutic mea-
sures, to the flock who loves the traditional faith. Honest Te
God shocked the entire Western world and continues to do sc
by continuing to evacuate Christian content from Christian
expression. It is now translated into German as Gott ist ander:
—God Is Different—and imported into East Germany where the
Communists are using it as atheist propaganda. “Apparently
the East German authorities knew the value of the book bette
than the bishop himself,” reported Congregational ministe
Harold O. J. Brown, who was on the scene studying the Germar
religious situation.>

But in Exploration Into God the Bishop goes further than he
did in the above-mentioned book in making it easy for people
to abandon the historic truths of Christianity. For this blatantly
anti-Christian book provides unmistakable evidence of the
Bishop’s flight from Christianity for those who hesitated before
to accept Alasdair Macintyre’s vigorous assessment of Robin.
son’s agnosticism, or rather atheism, on the occasion of the
appearance of Honest To God. At that time Macintyre wrote
“What is striking about Dr. Robinson’s book is first and fore

5. H. O. J. Brown, “The Struggle for the German Church,” National Review
April 8, 1969, p. 334.

Robinson: The Depersonalized God 369

most that he is an atheist ... The second half of Honest To God
reveals that the Bishop is a very conservative atheist. He wants
an atheist Christology . . .”6 Well, in Exploration Into God the
Bishop has attained what he was seeking. Now he is a radical
atheist, using Christian language to announce his rejection of
Christian faith, Now he explicitly states what he formerly
hinted at, that Christianity has been irrevocably replaced by
cosmic panentheism—pantheism, the former word now being
a philosophical not theological mask and softening of his utter
atheism.

What is more, the Bishop advances in his demolition of the
reality of God in the second book. God becomes transpersonal,
a “divine field” between persons growing in freedom and love.
God is a “whole humanity rather than like nature, society or
concept.” God is Dumitriu’s “dense and secret undergrowth
which is wholly composed of personal events.” Finally, God is
Teilhard’s “Centre of Centres” in an interlocking web of free
spiritual relationship in which the All and the personal are no
longer exclusive.” And again St. Paul is twisted into serving
this muddled pantheism through a misapplication of his pre-
diction of cosmic salvation in Christ.

Any evaluation in depth of Robinson’s novel theology will
discover that it is an amorphous, grandiose neo-gnosticism. Its
style is characterized by a mental bias blind to the hierarchies
of being, truth and values. It attempts the impossible; namely,
to liquidate all genuine antitheses by fuzzily fusing them. Thus
it creates unrealistic constructions because it disregards and
contemns given reality. Consequently, Robinson’s imagination
runs wild, unchecked by the wisdom of experience, reflection
or intuition. Utilizing emotional exotic effusions from crisis-
novels and pathological poems, the Bishop indulges in exag-
gerated claims about God and the meaning of Christianity. His
hysterical enthusiasm for adapting both to the standards of
modern acceptability obliterates the function of his reason,
with the tragic consequence that he eschews logical argu-
ments, arbitrarily selects analogical analyses, carelessly ig-
nores scientific, historical sources and oscillates wildly, even
artfully, from one contradictory position to another. In the
work of Robinson rhapsodizing has replaced reflecting. A mas-

6. Honest To God Debate, pp. 215-216.

370 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ter of oversimplification, the Bishop catches many a reader by
the superficial plausibility of his theological statements and
their specious similarity to traditional dogmas. A little reflec-
tion, however, reveals a theological process which evacuates
dogma of divine substance and substitutes man-made fictional
shadows in its place. Robinson’s theology is thus seen to be
devaluated currency; indeed his theology is a form of bank-
ruptcy of faith.

In his passionate desire to adapt God to the mentality of
progressive, scientific man, Robinson has made an idol of Mo-
dernity. He worships at its altar. He has founded the religion of
neo-modernism—a religion that has a new God, new theology,
new morality, new Gospel, new man, new universe and a new
eschatological millenium.

When an orthodox theologian reviews, even cursorily, the
doctrinal contént of Robinson’s capitalized word-constructions
or his contorted, visionary hypotheses, a sense of spiritual nau-
sea envelopes his spirit. What poisonous fare is found here in
place of the genuine food of divine truth! Let us briefly consider
just his theologically reductionist distortion of God, a distortion
that destroys the metaphysical nature of God and man as well
as sickens the human soul. Robinson sees God as a depersonal-
ized, solely immanentized force or ground of being pervading
all reality indifferently. The Bishop’s lust for a pancosmic pan-
theism has blinded him to the ineffable superiority and gran-
deur of the person. Infinitely inferior to the world of persons is
the universe of the impersonal. The world of the personal is an
absolutely new, superior, metaphysical and divine dimension
of being. Non-personal realities are spiritually asleep; they
simply exist, endure existence, unaware of the meaning of be-
ing, unawakened to the intelligent, lovable origin and end of all
creation. Impersonal realities, bereft as they are of reason and
liberty, are destined to be possessed and utilized. A person, on
the contrary, is wide-awake to the meaning of being. A person
has the unique perfection of possessing himself in thought and
love. A divine person, therefore, is perfect awareness of being,
i.e., perfect Truth Itself. Moreover, a divine person enjoys per-
fect possession of himself in perfect liberty and love, i.e. a
divine person is Perfect Liberty, Perfect Love.

Now Robinson’s God, far from being perfectly free and aware

Robinson: The Depersonalized God 371

of being, is caught in cosmic captivity. By calling Him “the God
beyond God,” Robinson does not liberate his captive God. We
have here another example of the use of bombastic, irrational,
shock expressions as a substitute for reflection in speech about
God. A “God beyond God” is a bloodless, pernicious abstraction,
worthy not of adoration but of rejection as a word idol. How
infinitely more noble is the orthodox doctrine about God! The
Tri-Personal absolute awareness of its Being and absolute
Possession of its Persons is in reality the unutterable mystery
of the Divine Family. Thus at their plenitude of perfection the
Tri-Personal absolute Awareness of Being and absolute Posses-
sion of Self are revealed as being tri-social, tri-loving and lova-
ble because they are 'tri-personal. The perfection of Persons is
the very essence of Gad! What a chasm yawns between the false
God of Robinson and the God of Revelation! Robinson’s God is
a “divine field” between beings that merely keeps them jux-
taposed. The Tri-Personal God of Revelation is the Divine
Family which invites and raises the human family to con-
scious, free, interpersonal communion and community through

: mutual knowledge and love. Robinson’s God, drained of all per-
sonal perfection, cannot be free, for persons alone enjoy free-
dom. Robinson’s God cannot communicate knowledge or love,
for persons alone can share love and expand one another’s
freedom.

In the last analysis, Robinson’s Exploration into God is a
misnamed enterprise. Had it been named after what it set out
to achieve, it would have been called Degradation of God. For
the whole enterprise dilutes and dissolves the grandeur of God.
The book distorts the New Testament message and leads to the
decomposition of Christianity. The Robinson theological ven-
ture issues out into the deformation of Christianity into a pan-
cosmic monism. A virtuosity in the practice of equivocation is
the technique that blurs all the mysteriously sublime differ-
ences in the hierarchy of reality and effects this nihilistic mo-
nism. A theology that depersonalizes God dehumanizes man. A
theology that liquidates realistic antitheses, liquidates liberty.
For whenever the contest between truth and falsity, good and
evil, natural and supernatural, divine and human is obliter-
ated, man is trapped as a mere moment in a necessarily devel-
oping cosmic continuum. In such degrading circumstances

372 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

man can no longer be challenged as a free person to storm the
kingdom of heaven and violently bear it away. The theology of
Robinson is therefore an artificial construction of humanistic
myths, It can never replace the theology of revelation, that
organically maturing relationship between the Divine Family
and the human family whereby man freely ascends, through
divine sonship in Christ, the God-Man, to the pinnacle of hu-
man and divine communion. Robinson’s theology, like Feuer-
bach’s—of which he heartily approves—turns out to be just
another sterile exercise in anthropological, atheistic human-
ism.

Because he refuses to listen to the message and realities of
the New Testament, because he refuses to imitate the doubting
Thomas and to “put his finger into His hands and his hand into
His side,” because he refuses “to taste and see how sweet” the
Lord who really lived in history is, Robinson thought up an
esoteric theology out of his own mind, aided by other equally
unrealistic rationalizations. He has concocted a hodgepodge of
shock-producing, sheer nonsense doctrine that shatters the
faith and lives of unwary Christians. His new religion, which
is really pantheism dressed in Christian vestments, turns out to
be on reflection an old and trite form of atheism. Stripped of its
rave notices, its hysterical billings and Christian camouflage,
the new Robinsonian religion stands forth naked as an old form
of crass naturalism.

CHAPTER XIV

|

ól
pa
id

Cox: The Delphic God
of the Secular City

IN 1965 DR. HARVEY COX, PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY
and Culture at Andover Newton Theological School in Massa-
chusetts, dropped one of those book-bombs that explode from
time to time in the world of thought and change the academic-
cultural landscape in a violent and permanent way. Already his
Secular City,‘ a best seller from birth, has gone through eight
printings. Cox is indisputably the most eloquent prophet for
secularization in America, perhaps in the entire West, writing
and preaching today. A Christian cannot ignore his message,
for its very popularity and notoriety are symptomatic of a pro-
found crisis of faith in the soul of the Christian West, a crisis
that is causing a mass movement of the faithful out of the City
of God and into the City of Man. The book is a brutal challenge
to the historical relevance of the Christian way of life for man
“come of age” in modern times. Here we will briefly consider

1. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: The Macmillan Company 1965;
paper back, 8th printing, 1966).

374 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

its principal theses, underline its assets and evaluate its con-
clusions.

The preamble to the Coxian creed states that our modern age
of science has ushered in a new, revolutionary civilization. The
intrinsic characteristic of this new civilization is its dynamic
development toward secularization. The creed of seculariza-
tion itself states that the entire public social life of “man come
of age” must be emancipated totally from any further exterior
dominance by the harsh, authoritarian commands of metaphy-
sics and religion. Modern man has arrived at humanistic
maturity; he is quite capable of forging his own humanized
universe unaided by exterior directions. Indeed, he will never
again tolerate, much less support, a civilization founded on the
twin pillars of a common metaphysics and a common faith.
Secularization has finally focused the split vision of man,
transferring his sight and energy from the misty horizons of
the World beyond to the clear challenges of the World right
here. Secularization has sounded the death knell of other-
wordly Christianity. It has set itself the goal of refashioning the
future of humanity through its program for the complete dedi-
vinization of the temporal. i

The Secular City itself is the highest accomplishment of an
evolving historical necessity. It began and grew up out of the
tribe which was knit together by the bonds of blood and reli-
gious myths. Mythological religions impregnated the great
events of life—birth, death, marriage, love, war—with their
own meanings and directed the entire tribe toward preternatu-
ral destinies. However, with the advent of language and cur-
rency, the tribe developed upward, becoming the town. In this
stage of social evolution diversification of functions, commerce
and the work created by advancing science shattered tribal
patterns and traditional molds, creating thereby town culture,
town religion and town ethics. Town society was the antithesis
of the thesis tribal society. The town went on to fashion so
highly an industrialized complex that a new synthesis-society,
known as “technopolis,” came into existence. The Secular City
is the apotheosis of this historical dialectical progression. The
Secular City is Technopolis Aeterna. It is not the Kingdom of
God, which is disappearing from public life, back into the
hearts of men. But the Secular City opens up new possibilities

Cox: The Delphic God of the Secular City 375

for the faith and the Church. Its worldly interests and enter-
prises bring forth new aspects of the Gospel message that only
awaited our modern era to be discovered. The Bible itself has
always taught secularization, but, since the hour for this mes-
sage had not yet arrived, the Churches had missed this dimen-
sion of the Scriptures. ‘

Cox warns his reader, however, that secularization must not
be confused with secularism. Secularism is the mystique of
laicism; it is a closed, rigid ideology, functioning with all the
narrowness of a new religion. Secularization, on the other
hand, rooted as it is in the Bible, holds that the whole universe
is holy, erasing the distinction between the sacred and profane.
Far from being a rigid, fixed staring vision of the world, secu-
larization is ever new, rushing to keep pace with history’s fast-
moving journey toward progressive becoming. In the Secular
City, therefore, truth is not accepted as an eternally fixed and
static body of doctrines, but as the ideas that. are relevant to the
present historical moment of development. Reminiscent of the
thinking of the philosophic founder of Pragmatism, the secula-
rist in seeking truth asks the same question that William James
put to himself: “What is the cash value of this idea?” Truth is
ideas that work, get the desired results, move the times ahead.
The same relativized mobility is the criterion for the validity
of an ethical system in the Secular City. There is no absolute
corporate ethical code to which all men must subscribe under
pain of moral degradation and sanction. Ethical and value sys-
tems in the Secular City are founded on the latest social con-
sensus. And this is not surprising, but quite normal and to be
expected. For metaphysical relativism naturally leads to moral
relativism, morals being but the practical prolongation of
metaphysical convictions. A sliding metaphysical scale about
the truth of reality begets a sliding moral scale about the good-
ness of reality as it is incarnated in human conduct.

When he explains the style and spirit of the Secular City, Cox
insists on its. pragmatic and profane preoccupations and em-
phases. These secular virtues are absolutely essential in the
leader who would accomplish worldly goals. The Secular City
prophet and star pragmatic performer who captured the heart
of Harvey Cox was John F. Kennedy. Why was this? Because, in
the eyes of Cox, this leader wasted no time on the borderline,

376 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ultimate questions of truth and religion. Successful perfor-
mance in getting the day-to-day job done was his yardstick for
the truth. And the man was eminently indifferent to any partic-
ular religion, even opposing his own fellow Catholics from
Pope to peasant from time to time. As for his favorite prophet
of the profane, Cox selects Albert Camus as Secular City savior.
Camus rejected the Christian God because this God would have
men become more interested in the next rather than in this
world; he made dreamers rather than doers of men. Moreover,
Camus was an atheist in violent revolt, rejecting the Christian
God for depriving man of his liberty and responsibility. He
never forgave this God, either, for allowing innocent childrer.
to suffer so senselessly. Camus held with Proudhon that “Goc
is the evil,” since He deprives man of his own creative powe1
and prevision. Thus the profane prophet of the Secular City
chooses man, despite his failings, in preference to the tyrant
God of the Christians.

What about the style of human existence in the Secular City’
Paradoxically it becomes progressively atomized and yet pro.
gressively collectivized. Technology fragments the unity of the
family, swallows up small farmers and artisans, scatters smal:
communities, clogs the cities with displaced millions, seals ofi
intersubjective relationships even among family members anc
delivers the resultant anonymous human herds to state socia
engineers who rule with technopolitan computers. Cox calmly
accepts this technique of human degradation as the necessary
price that must be paid for the advent of the Secular City mil
lenium. After all, he argues, the loss of privacy is balanced by
the gain of mobility. And the Bible testifies that a people pub
licly welded together and constantly on the move can become
a great nation, as did the Chosen but wandering People.

What especially concerns the Christian is the nature of thr
God of the Secular City. And like the other transcendent reali
ties examined in that City of Man, the God of Harvey Cox i:
ambiguous in the extreme. He is Janus-faced; His deistic coun
tenance faces the European West; His despotic countenanci
faces the Marxist East. Cox forbids his deistic God from takin;
part in human affairs. This God of the Enlightenment who ha
created a perfectible universe must remain a mere spectator a
man fashions the cosmos to his own image and likeness. Godi

Cox: The Delphic God of the Secular City 377

not to interfere in human history, not even in the interior con-
sciences of man. This would be despotism. Thus the deistic God
of the Secular City is banished from public life. He may not be
invoked in civil ceremonies, nor be petitioned for the success
of war and the attainment of peace. He is banished even in
name from public education; He is not consulted about public
morals; He is exiled from human history. In his temporal enter-
prises to humanize his universe man is to ostracize God even
to the extent of maintaining silence about Him, going it alone
for fear of losing his humanity if God interfered to help him.

Yet Dr. Cox is in a hurry to bring to completion the erection
of his Secular Citadel. But he finds men and their social institu-
tions frustratingly slow to make the changes in doctrine, poli-
cies and social structures so absolutely necessary for the
achievement of the New Secular Jerusalem. In his estimation,
then, some sort of catalyst was needed to speed up the political,
socio-historical changes and differentiations required for the
creation and celebration of gleaming Technopolis as a reality
upon the mountain top. It is in this noble cause that the deistic
God of Harvey Cox comes out of celestial retirement to inter-
vene in the temporal affairs of men. Cox calls Him the biblical
God, the God who goaded the reluctant Jews on to their rendez-
vous with the City of Jerusalem. But Cox is careful to explain
what he means by biblical; he accepts Van Peursen’s, Michal-
son’s and Lehmann’s meanings of the term. The first two au-
thors insist that God is the God of History, the last calls Him the
God of Politics. Thus Cox’s God of social and political change
turns out to be none other than the God of History, the God who
is the inevitable, immanent, evolutionary process toward the
Secular City Summit. Cox’s deistic God, formerly ostracized
from history, now becomes Cox’s Marxist God, the director and
catalyst of historical development toward full secularization.
For in the Secular City as well as in Marxist cities politics
replaces metaphysics as the language of theology. Reflecting
on the activist characteristics of Cox’s Oriental God, Professor
Frederick Wilhelmsen writes:

This Coxian god is a wild and savage Force bent upon
destroying all the icons and statutary thrown up beside the
road by Western man on his pilgrimage through time. Cox

378 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

commends what he calls “the biblical God” because this
god makes his presence known in history by smashing the
“idols” of men and by humbling the “spirit of pride.” This
god is truly a tribal god—a god of the desert, a whirlwind
out of the clouds, a god so remote that we must address
him not as “Thou” but as “You,” as the “You” out there in
the darkness, the unknown and unapproachable partner
in civilization’s destruction. Like all Iconoclasts and Mani-
cheans, the god of Harvey Cox has come riding out of the
wastes of the East, determined upon the destruction of
Christendom’s glories. But this god is not our God, the Tri-
une God of Nicea.?

And Cox has a role for the Christian Churches in his Secular
City. They are to become instruments in the service of the God
who, through politics and social actions, humanizes the world
through progressive secularization. They are to abandon any
further efforts to sacramentalize or divinize, for in truth such
efforts actually desacralized the holy universe. They are to
leave the God of personal contemplation and join the god of
collective, social activity. The only meaningful future open to
Christian Churches is the program of self-secularization, the
abandonment of religious universities and their total adher-
ence to politico-social actions and programs calculated to hu-
manize the world.

Secular City—City of Serfdom

In evaluating the thought of Harvey Cox, the reader is im-
pressed by the author’s genuine concern for the social better-
ment of man. Cox treats seriously the important questions of
the place and function of God, Christianity, the Churches and
the faithful in the modern age of revolutionary, social disinte-
gration. His thought shocks readers and sends them back intc
reflective seclusion, pondering the ultimate question of God,
the question that for philosopher Unamuno eclipsed all other
questions: “Is man all alone or not in this universe?” Then toc
Cox has presented many valid, even brilliant, analyses of social
mores, as witness his incisive, condemnatory critique of Play

2, Frederick Wilhelmsen, Cox's Secular City. . .City Of Night, a pamphle
published by the Society for the Christian Commonwealth, 422 Washingtor
Bldg. Washington D.C. 20005, 1967.

Cox: The Delphic God of the Secular City 379

boy’s sexual code. Cox is a seminal thinker, opening avenues of
thought that others will follow, refine and organize.

But when one has graciously admitted the talents of Harvey
Cox, one must immediately go on to underline the limitations
of his teachings. Cox’s thesis that all cosmic and human history
are inevitably moving toward the apotheosis of secularization
is, to say the least, unproven, one-sided and irrationally biased.
It suffers from the same voluntaristic reductionism that viti-
ates the Marxist thesis concerning the fatalistic arrival of the
class society. No intelligent, convincing analyses are given ex-
plaining why secularization is a reasonable, normal develop-
ment from tribe through town to technopolis, nor why the
desacralization of society is a universal good. Cox seems to
revel in making unsubstantiated prophecies, moral judgments,
denunciations, commands and even insults. A religious and
metaphysical skeptic, Cox, nevertheless, manages to produce a
fascinating rationalistic theory of historical progress, a gnosti-
cism that divinizes the temporal, an ethics of social nihilism
and a politics of the totalitarian Secular City. Moreover, as Dr.
Wilhelmsen has shrewdly observed, there exists in Dr. Cox the
Manichean itch for “an excessive dualism: a conscious effort
not only to seek distinctions without being, but to force these
distinctions into separations and the separations into di-
vorces.”? God and the world, Church and State, the profane and
the holy are forced by Cox into tragic, unnatural, Manichean
opposition. Such a reductionist oversimplification of the or-
ganically orchestrated complexity of existences into hostile du-
alisms reveals Cox to be, in Wilhelmsen’s view, a kind of
Americanized Marx.” Wiihelmsen profoundly analyses the
disintegrating function of secularization as follows:

It seems to me that the secularizing spirit, so handsomely
articulated by Dr. Cox, is guilty of just this kind of reduc-
tionism. First the City of Man and everything found in it
is divorced from the City of God. Religion is then interio-
rized, forbidden expression in the public forum, and the
forum is forbidden any traffic with the temple. The frag-
( menting of life gathers momentum due to the secularists
monopoly of demiurgical science. The secularists are
eventually able to dissect man into komo ludens, homo

3. Frederick Wilhelmsen, op.cit., p. 9.

380 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

amans, homo economicus, homo politicus, homo artis-
ticus, etc., severing nerve after nerve of the human spirit
until man finally collapses into the many, having lost the
unity with which he emerged into being from the hand of
God.‘

But perhaps Harvey Cox’s greatest disservice to man is that
heé renders revelation and salvation impossible for man. His
Oriental God is a secularizer, while his deistic God is sealed off
from encounter with man through Incarnation, grace, the Sac-
raments or the gift of divine sonship. Cox does what he accuses
Christianity of having done; he desacralizes man and the uni-
verse; he hates the sacraments and liturgies of Christianity and
would wipe them from the face of the earth. In his eyes,
Churches should become departments for social planning
in the Secular City; theology should become politics; liturgy
social action programs; sacraments civic ceremonies. Someone
should have told Dr. Cox that there is nothing new in all this
so-called modern theory and action. Auguste Comte had been
through all this before Dr. Cox, even down to Cox’s theory of the
three stages of development from superstitious tribe to scien-
tific Secular City via metaphysical immaturity. Dr. Harvey Cox
and his Secular City is Auguste Comte and his Scientific City
revisited. Where Comte changed theology into sociology and
religion into sociocracy, Cox changes theology into politics and
religion into secularism. The pragmatic City of Harvey Cox
will learn, even as the Scientific City of Comte did before it,
that the ultimate questions of life, death, God, religion, truth,
falsity, freedom, slavery, salvation cannot be solved by natural
human resources. The Secular City is impotent in the face of
these transcendent mysteries. Politics is the science of the
practical, the science of finding adequate policies to solve the
everyday problems of man’s temporal enterprise, his art of
self-government. It is very true that many great philosophers
and theologians wrote masterpieces on political matters—
Plato with his Republic and Laws, Augustine with his City oj
God, Thomas with his De Regimine Principis. But these very
geniuses who honored politics as the highest art of which man
was capable, that of self-government, nevertheless were con-

4. Ibid., pp. 9-10.

Cox: The Delphic God of the Secular City 381

vinced that there could be no serious, lasting, just system of
self-government except a system founded on the pillars of
metaphysical and religious truth. For before man can know or
govern himself well, he must make deep researches into the
Good, the True, the Beautiful—into God.®

In conclusion, then, it can be said that secularized society is
isolated society, for secularization cuts man’s roots in God.
Such a society is in flight downward and inward. For seculari-
zation is in essence an apostasy from God, Christ and his
Church. To deny that God has come to dwell permanently with
man until the end of time and beyond in the everliving events
of Christ, His Church, His sacraments, His truth and His grace
is to run away from the plenitude of divine-human commun-
ion. A secularist society is, therefore, a solipsistic society, con-
demned by choice to self-inprisonment. When, therefore,
Harvey Cox sees in secularization a means toward authentic
ecumenism, he tragically misses the metaphysical and divine
dimensions of the mystery of apostasy. For it is the sacramen-
tal that expands the dimensions of natural beings, lifting them
way beyond their natural capacities toward transfiguration in
Christ and God. A Secular City purged of every sacred sign
points only toward itself and a selfishness that cramps being.
Thus, the Secular City which banishes God from man and in-
carcerates man from God is a City of Serfdom, a city of en-
forced separation. Such a secularized world must necessarily
be heartless, a concentration camp in which are kept the hu-
man creatures violently abducted from God. And in order to
control the abducted creatures, all remembrances of their love
relationships with God will also have to be obliterated. Thus the
Secular City is a City that rules by a program of iconoclasm. It
secularizes cathedrals, altars, sacred art, sacred books, cultur-
izing them as interesting museums and art objects that recall
the superstitious ages of man not yet come of age. It is for this
reason that Wilhelmsen calls the Secular City the “City of
Night.” The Secular City puts out the lights of civilization, the
lights of reason and revelation in a program of wild madness
that issues in self-inflicted blindness.

Thus, because he refuses to respect the rich complexity of
reality, natural and supernatural, because he will not listen to

5. René Marlé, “La Cité Séculiére,” Etudes, juillet-août, 1966, pp. 120-130.

382 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the diverse needs of the orders of being, because he will not
distinguish without divorcing the analogical natures and rela-
tions of the different orders of beings and, above all, because he
has lost a reverential love and faith in the powers of reason and
revelation, Harvey Cox has created the socio-political night-
mare known as Technopolis into which he would force the
entire human race whether it likes its new city or not. The
Christian Church has been founded by the Triune God to be the
vessel of salvation for mankind. In determining to destroy her
through the process of secularization, Dr. Cox and his Secular
City have chosen to become the advance guard of a new barbar-
ism.

Part Four

A
pq

Gods as Victims of Man

But if God is really dead, and not merely in eclipse because of the
weakness of our human vision, then our faith is dead too. What is
really to be feared is that the new radicalism will turn out to be an
excuse to fall back upon the old liberalism, with its misunderstanding
of the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ as one of the forms assumed
by human religion in its quest for the meaning of life.
God Is Dead: The Anatomy Of A Slogan
Kenneth Hamilton

. - -Concerning the problem of whether there are gods or not, the Pon-
tifex did not know on what he could rely. That is how it was!...Do you
think that anyone can live that way? One can Zive. . but one lives as
though lost, in a prolonged and mortal anguish. . .The substance of that
life is desperation. ..Desperation. . .leads in an early stage to exaspera-
tion; and history is filled with exaggerated and extreme phenomena
with which man managed to stupefy and inebriate himself.
Man And Crisis
José Ortega y Gasset

384 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

I have made my peace with my Maker, much to the dismay of my
enlightened friends, who reproach me for this backsliding into the old
“superstition,” as they like to call my homecoming to God. The entire
high clergy of atheism has pronounced its anathema over me, and
there are fanatic priestlings of unbelief who would like to span me on
the rack that I might revoke my heresies. . .Yes, like the prodigal soñ,
I have returned to God after a long period of tending the swine with
the Hegelians.
Werke, II
Heinrich Heine

CHAPTER XV

|

pA
id
pA
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ia

V abanian:

God's Cultural Pallbearer

WE WILL STUDY IN THIS AND THE NEXT THREE CHAP-
ters the teachings of those new phenomena among men, the
Christian atheists. They proclaim that man can perfectly well
live a full, responsible, mature life without the need of there
being a God. What makes these men so fascinating is that they
are professional Christian theologians who elaborate “death-
of-God” theologies that destroy the very subject of their aca-
demic, even pastoral, dedication. One would think that with
God obliterated, the theology of the Son of God would also be
defunct and these unemployed theologians would be turning to
other academic interests to keep themselves profitably en-
gaged. But the very reverse of this expectation is true. Never
have “death-of-God” theologians been busier writing books for
hungry readers or more in demand as lecturers for fascinated
academic audiences. Not only that, but they are also in demand
to address all types of listeners—Christians, atheists, Jews, in-
deed even the motley millions glued to radio and TV sets. What
can be the secret of their success?

386 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

First there is the shock of contradiction. Some statement is
proclaimed as a truth which directly contradicts a truth that
has been held sacred for centuries. Then there is the fascina-
tion of ambiguity. These theologians do not proclaim pure, una-
dulterated atheism. They are not bold advocates of brazen
inconoclasm, nor Church-destroyers, nor Bible-burners, They
are iconoclasts of the mind; they are image and idea destroyers.
They claim that man’s images of God must be jettisoned; these
are empty, sterile because the very idea of God is meaningless
to the modern mind. Men who still cling to a living, triune God
are actually living on old, old memories which are fading into
the past, dead, dark ages. There is nothing in modern scientific
experience that even begins to correspond to such an outland-
ish image of God. Believers are invited by the new theologians
to come up to the maturity of modern times, drop their old
household gods, open their eyes to reality around them and
courageously decide to live without God. This coming to terms
with Godless reality constitutes authentic human existence,

But on the positive side of the leger, the new radical theolo-
gians insist that the loss of God does not entail the loss of
Christianity. For in losing God, the modern Christian discovers
the full man, Jesus. And in this new discovery Christianity
grows as a force that benefits contemporary man. Christian
atheists, therefore, perfrom the enlightened task of detaching
Jesus from New Testament mythology. They do this by inter-
preting the New Testament in a Godless manner. For they
make a distinction between “Jesus language” and “God lan-
guage” as they appear in the New Testament. The two are by
no means the same and the former is to be prized while the
latter is to be purged. Thus the authentic Jesus is revealed and
he is found to be calling men of all ages to be his disciples,
following him on the hard road of social, moral and experimen-
tal progress. In effect, then, what the Godless theologians are
trying to do, as they formulate their rosy future, is to preserve
something of the Christian tradition while jettisoning other
sections of this tradition found to be embarrassing to contem-
porary man. They admit that they are radical in this procedure,
but insist that this process of purification alone will save Chris-
tianity as a meaningful and forceful way of life for modern
man. As we study each of the four radical theologians treated

Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer 387

in these four chapters, we will see how each attempts to justify
his reinterpretation of the New Testament and whether, in
fact, each does save a meaningful Christianity for mankind,
after first divorcing God the Father from Jesus His Son, and
then dismissing God as incompatible, even insufferable, to the
modern mentality.

And this brings us to another reason for the astonishing suc-
cess of the Christian atheists’ theology. Their “God is dead”
movement flatters and sates a deep psychological need in man.
It nourishes man’s spiritual hunger to be considered “up to
date,” truly contemporary, avant-gard progressive, hence rele-
vantly meaningful. Every gnostic doctrine invites men into the
circle of the elite, thereby preserving man from the horrible
experience of spiritual isolation and the loneliness of being left
out. Now this radical theology, with its thrilling resonances
attuned. to the revolutionary spirit of the times, gives men a
sense of involvement in the movements of social, cultural,
scientific, political and philosophico-theological expansions for
human betterment. Any person of spirit and intelligence would
want to “get with” such an inspiring movement. And in getting
with such a movement enthusiastically, many a person of spirit
and intelligence has soared to ecstatic melioristic madness,
substituting a secular for sacred, a human for divine way to
salvation.

Moreover, this mystique of leveling barriers through revolu-
tion, thereby expanding the exercise of liberty, was already
vibrant in other contemporary movements which energized
through spiritual radiation the “death-of-God” revolution in
theology. Kenneth Hamilton perceptively observes that “the
new radicalism is the theoretical development of the drive to
break down the division between the Church and the world, a
drive which has been operating within Christian communities
in many places.” He goes on, then, to enumerate the astonish-
ing French “worker-priests” experiment in the Catholic
Church, the Japanese “no church movement,” the American
drive to bring the Gospel to Main Street and the return of the
Church to the Inner City as examples of this effort to prove that
Christianity is not unconcerned about man and his mission in
this world. However, the “Death-of-God” movement goes far
beyond all these reasonable missions to the world. Capitalizing

388 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

on the decay of the religious spirit, on the loss of habits and
attitudes of piety, on the loss of moral and metaphysical coher-
ence and transcendent direction in a post-Christian age, the
radical theologians boldly preach that the establishment of a
thoroughly secularized society is the only road to salvation for
a world that is spiritually confused, psychologically broken and
morally disintegrating into chaotic anonymity.!

And what has been the attitude of these prophets for a secula-
rized society toward the protest of orthodox Christians who
brand their revolutionary adventures in far-out radicalism as
apostasy from God, Christ and Christianity and surrender to a
satanized society? They have adamantly, almost obsessively, in-
sisted that traditional Christianity is irrevocably dead. There is
no hope of its resurrection. The radicals have accused the tradi-
tionalists of repeating dogmatic formulas by rote, almost in
magical incantations, formulas that no longer have any mean-
ing for modern man. The traditionalists are callous to the needs
of modern man. Moreover, the radicals have also scored the or-
thodox Christians for their ignorance in not keeping up with the
changing times and their fraudulence in not living up to the
Christianity they verbally profess. There is no attempt made by
the radicals to dulcify their pill of secular profanation for easy
consumption by the faithful. Like it or not, Godless Christianity
is here to stay. There is a fatalistic finality about their repeated
insistence that the only option open to the modern Christian is
the following of Christ without the acceptance of God. The only
alternative is inauthentic existence, directionless life, a hope-
less, loveless absorption into a meaningless world of incom-
municable masses. Only the message of the new theological
radicalism reveals the mind of Christ for contemporary man. As
a matter of cold reality, no other message will be listened to by
scientific man. And the essential truth in that message can be
expressed in exultant terms as follows: “God is dead! Long live
Christ! Long live emancipated man! Long live Godless Chris-
tianity!” We will now examine briefly the great, modern repre-
sentatives of this new, radical, theological message of Godless
Christianity. They are: Gabriel Vahanian, Thomas J. J. Altizer,
William Hamilton and Paul Van Buren.

1. Kenneth Hamilton, God Is Dead: The Anatomy ofa Slogan (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1966), pp. 20-21.

Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer 389
Gabriel Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer

Gabriel Vahanian was born in 1927 in Marseilles. He studied
at the Free Faculty of Protestant Theology in Paris, at the Ecole
des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne and at the Theologicial Semi-
nary, Princeton, gaining his licentiate in theology in 1949, his
master’s degree in theology in 1950 and his doctorate in theol-
ogy in 1958. He is presently Professor of Religion at Syracuse
University. Rudolf Bultmann asserts that Vahanian’s Death of
God is one of the most exciting books he has read in recent
years. Written in 1961, the book does not make for smooth read-
ing. It wanders through cultural, political and religious history
in order to establish the veracity of the thesis that today man
is living in a definitely post-Christian era. In a more recent
book, Wait Without Idols, Vahanian expresses his great con-
cern over the death of God in literature and theology, especially
as they are mutually related. Normally Vahanian writes as an
urbane critic of cultural, literary and theological develop-
ments. But he can lose his urbanity at times, as when he strikes
out at Jacques Maritain and Christopher Dawson in petty dis-
agreement over the medical diagnosis of the dying condition of
contemporary Christian culture and civilization. Apparently
Maritain and Dawson, as Catholic specialists, had visited and
spent long hours studying the patient before Vahanian got
around to looking in and they reported that, though presently
passing through a serious crisis, Christianity could and would,
as it had so often done in previous centuries, recover and regain
vigorous health. This report directly contradicted Dr. Vaha-
nian’s diagnosis which was that Christianity was already dead.
And the Catholic report so irked Dr. Vahanian that, instead of
refuting it in a scholarly manner, he lost his composure and
accused both.Maritain and Dawson, with T. S. Eliot thrown in
for good measure, of commiting a fraud on the public. And the
fraud consisted in the honest declaration and belief of these
men “that Christianity is the loftiest and most spiritual revela-
tion we know and that it has the highest validity.”? Vahanian
himself goes along with Troeltsch, who rejects this thesis for
scientific and historical reasons. Well and good. Vahanian is

2. Gabriel Vahanian, Tke Death of God (New York: George Braziller, 1961),
p. 158.

390 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

entitled to his own conclusions, but he is most unscholarly,
uncivil and unconvincing in his name-calling riposte to such
great literary men whose achievements far surpass his own.
Leaving aside this most uncharacteristic Vahanian lapse into
theatrical crying from the pit, we can now turn to a probing of
his serious thesis: that “God’s death” is everywhere proclaimed
as an irreversible fact by the culture, ideals and deeds of our
modern post-Christian world.

The cultural fact of our times is that man has lost the sense
of any transcendental.or supernatural realm of being or exis-
tence, All one has to do to judge a society is to examine its
practices. And today Christians do not practice their faith.
They have abandoned the vision of the world as the theater of
God’s glory. Instead, they view the world as the theater of the
absurd, of misery, of despair. They have substituted an imma
nentist view of the world for the Christian transcendentalist
vision. All human problems are, therefore, approached and
solved solely from an immanentist emphasis; all reality is here;
there is no hereafter. In such a self-enclosed setting God is
simply no longer necessary. Vahanian agrees with Sartre that
for modern man God is de trop, superfluous. Maybe He exists
in Himself, but what difference does that make for modern
man? Regardless of whether God is or is not self-existent, His
reality as it has been presented through the ages in Biblical and
Christian tradition has become today culturally meaningless.
Even talking about God is a useless activity, an exercise in
futility. T. S. Eliot indicated this secularistic phenomenon
when he wrote in his Christianity And Culture:

A society has ceased to be Christian when religious prac-
tices have been abandoned, when behaviour ceases to be
regulated by reference to Christian principle, and when in
effect prosperity in this world for the individual or for the
group has become the sole conscious aim. The other point
of view which is less readily apprehended, is that a society
has not ceased to be Christian until it has become posi-
tively something else. It is my contention that we have
today a culture which is mainly negative, but which, so far
as it is positive, is still Christian. I do not think that it can
remain negative, because a negative culture has ceased to
be efficient in a world where economic as well as spiritual
forces are proving the efficiency of cultures which, even
when pagan, are positive; and I believe that the choice

Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer 391

before us is between the formation of a new Christian
culture and the acceptance of a pagan one. Both involve
radical changes; but I believe that the majority of us, if we
could be faced immediately with all the changes which
will only be accomplished in several generations, would
prefer Christianity.*

Vahanian is convinced that man’s loss of the sense of tran-
scendence is proof that a culture that was once Christian has
ceased to be so because it is being positively informed by an
anti-Christian principle—the eternal tendency in man to ab-
solutize and deify his own works and to call the result the
religion of Christianity. Thus, one should not be fooled by peri-
odic swells in the masses’ interest in religion. These revivals
are not signs of a return to authentic Christianity. They are
adventures in mere religiosity, “desperate caricatures” of the
true Christian faith. And Vahanian, in his theological analysis
of current literature and art forms, illustrates the counterfeit
Christianity that prevails today from the opening scenes of the
film La Dolce Vita. There in Rome, the capital of Christendom,
a huge statue of Christ, the Savior of mankind, floats suspended
from a helicopter over a group of hedonistic sunbathers, prone
on the terrazza of a plush Italian palazzo below, who gape up
indifferently and cynically joke about the incongruity of it all.
That incongruous scene is a symbol of the sickness of religi-
osity that infects society. For society for too long has bowed
down in worship to the idolatrous gods of cultural religiosity.
Now modern man is sick of this idolatry; he is alienated from
its hypocrisy; he wants to be forthrightly secular and profane;
he wants to affirm himself, to celebrate his world. Hence he no
longer has any patience with a Christianity that restricts his
thought and liberty, denies him the world and refuses to give
itself to him. Culturally and theologically in revolt against
Christianity, modern man proclaims that the age of religion
has ended.

Of course, adjusting to transitional ages is nothing new to
Christianity. In its very inception it had to prove itself to be
meaningful to a pagan world whose ideals were the very re-
verse of its own. Then too, St. Paul had to insist on de-Judaizing
the early Church in order to win over the Gentiles. Despite the

3. T. S. Eliot, Christianity And Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace and
World, Inc., Harvest Book 1949), p. 10.

392 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

risk of thereby denying Judaism or falsifying Christianity, the
changes were courageously undertaken and Christianity pros-
pered. Today an even greater chasm separates Christianity
from the modern world. The modern atheistic mentality is ut-
terly opposed to Christianity. Modern day Pauls are calling for
similar accomodations to the needs of the world. They are ask-
ing for demythologization (Bultmann), deliteralization (Til-
lich), de-divinization (Cox) or de-Christianization (Robinson)
of the Gospel in a frenzied attempt to bring together traditional
Christianity and contemporary society in meaningful com-
munion. Vahanian does not consider any of these procedures
radical enough for the attainment of the desired communion.
He writes: “I personally consider that the most radical step
consists not in de-Christianizing the faith but in de-Westerniz-
ing and in de-religionizing Christianity.”* For no reforms can
come from within the degenerate Christian tradition. If we are
to recover theological significance and depth, if we are to make
the faith live once again in the hearts of modern men, we must
utilize materials, employ approaches and contact organiza-
tions outside of and unconnected with traditional Christian
thought. In other words, reformers of the faith must operate
outside the Church, since traditional Christianity is ina dying,
even defunct, state. Vahanian points to the work being done by
literary men in their efforts to purify the faith of religiosity.
Novelists, dramatists, philosophers, movie-directors and non-
religious men of other professions have taken up the task of:
iconoclasm. This mission of the destruction of false idols prop-
erly belongs to the Church, but the degenerate Church is delin-
quent in this duty. Post-Christian man thus finds himself
obliged to smash idols, emptying the temple of God of them in
order to ready it for the use of modern man. On the other hand
and more positively, modern man aims at transfiguring life
through the recovery of his own responsible creatureliness in
the face of God’s wholly otherness." De-religionizing Christian-
ity renders the faith contemporary without immersing it in
immanentist anthropologies. For this process of reviving the
faith concentrates not on a reconversion of God but on a recon-

4. Gabriel Vahanian, “Theology and the End of the Age of Religion,” Con-
cilium, June 1966, Volume 6 Number, 2, p. 51.

5. Thomas W. Ogletree, The Death of God Controversy (Nashville, Tenn.:
Abingdon Press, 1966), p. 24.

Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer 393

version of the moral, social, political and cultural structures
and activities of the Church.

Vahanian objects to the dimension of the supernatural in
reality which Christian teaching expounds; he claims that this
doctrine depreciates the intrinsic worth of creation and of tem-
poral communities. Moreover, this depreciation of the natural
and the temporal begets in the depreciator an arrogant
spiritual inflation. This insufferable attitude is found in Chris-
tian Churches which arrogate for themselves alone an eternal,
other-worldly goal of glory. But the absorption of the temporal
order into the supernatural violates the independent being and
mission of human culture. “Now it is in and through the world,”
writes Vahanian, “that God’s holiness manifests itself. It
dwells in the world and no matter whether the world be con-
ceived as profane or religious, it is the world that constitutes
the context where faith must assert its secularity and the
Church its eschatological reality.”®

In Vahanian’s view, therefore, secularity calls for the Chris-
tian’s affirmation of faith as a presence in a world that still is
endowed with its original goodness. The trouble with Christian-
ity is that it calls men to be saints through a denial of the world.
Vahanian agrees with Marx’s objection to this Christian chal-
lenge: “It is easy to become a saint if one does not want to
be a man.” The unforgivable sin of Christianity is that it
suppresses the manhood of man. Rather than accept such
a suppression, modern man opts for religionless Christianity.
Post-Christian man refuses to see Christian life as based on a
separation from the world. And Vahanian presents post-Chris-
tian man’s reasoning to this conclusion as follows: “All is grace,
therefore God is dead. For if life is meaningless, then there
must be no God. But, if it is meaningful... it is meaningful by
virtue of some kind of immanent grace, therefore God does not
exist. If all is grace, then God is dead. Or: All is grace because
God is dead.””

For post-Christian man, then, true faith is founded on action
that attains an eschatological goal within the world and time
through socio-cultural structures formed by the world and
adhered to by the Church. No longer is faith founded on par-

6. Gabriel Vahanian, “Theology and the End of the Age of Religion,” p. 53.
7. Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God, pp. 106-7.

394 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

ticipation in structures created by the Church and adhered
to by the world. Vahanian has reversed the hierarchic be-
ings, dignities and goals of the world and the Church. Now
the world transcends the Church even though this tran-
scendence remains trapped in time. The Church has become
the religious, sociological instrument of the world. Now the
Church proves her commitment to God by serving the ideals
of the world with distinction. Only in this manner
may the Christian faith hope to be purified of the dross of
religiosity; only thus may a purified Christian faith hope to
rescue the world from the profane and save it in religionless
Christianity.

The time has come to cease viewing the problem of faith
under the aspect of a war between God and man, the world and
the Church, believer and unbeliever. This is a deceptive way of
posing the problem. Faith should never serve as a justification
for any social segregation. Christianity, therefore, should cease
identifying itself as a particular, unique, religious cultural and,
above all, divine entity. Rather, Christians, imitating St. Paul’s
example, should be willing to be atheists with atheists in free-
dom with all men for the sake of God, not in spite of God. This
is the new meaning and universality of religionless Christian-
ity. This is the mystique of immanentism, it rejects the opposi-
tion between believer and unbeliever. For faith does not
separate, rather it affirms “that unbelief waits in ambush for
the believer in as much as faith blinds the unbeliever.”® Men
are marked off from each other not as believers and unbeliev-
ers, but as being over against God. God is the line of demarca-
tion. What then is the post-Christian man to do, now that he is
non-Christian, religionless and Churchless? Vahanian gives his
answer in the title of his last book. The post-Christian man
must “Wait without Idols.” And for what is he to wait? For the
eventual breaking in of the Wholly Other—the transcendent
God who can never be objectified. Above all, the post-Christian
man must never go back to the idolatry of traditional Christian-
ity nor to that “imitation of Christianity” known as religiosity
and the caricature of Christianity.

8. Gabriel Vahanian, “Theology and the End of the Age of Religion,” p. 55.

Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer - 395
Vahanian’s Vanishing Vision

In assessing the intellectual horizons of any man we must
always remember thai each one of us tends to make the limits
of his field of vision the limits of all reality. Unfortunately,
Vahanian, in his enthusiasm for this world and in his disillu-
sionment with the world of the supernatural has drastically cut
back his vision to the temporal, throwing away the infinite
horizons of the mythical, the metaphysical and the divine as
these have expanded, transfigured and glorified—but never
suppressed—the world of man. Vahanian goes about extin-
guishing the lights in heaven in order to illumine more lights
on earth. But if the sun and stars were extinguished, would
more light appear on the earth? If the light of the Bible, of the
God-Man, of the Church founded by Him and of the millions of
scholars and saints who have illumined His message is extin-
guished, how can that loss ennoble the reality of this world?
The dimension of the divine, of the supernatural, in no way
minimizes the glory and reality of this world. Vahanian is suff-
ering from a sickness that has afflicted many a noble scholar
of our day. They have so focused on the weaknesses of members
of Christianity—and no honest man will deny or hide these
weaknesses—that they have blinded themselves to the over-
whelming evidence of wisdom, goodness, love, self-sacrifice
and heroic self-donation of untold millions of Christians living
at this very moment, not to mention the glorious history of
Christian services to mankind throughout the ages. “Blessed is
he who is not scandalized in me,” said Christ, who never pre-
dicted impeccability for His Chruch but warned His faithful
against the false prophets who would arise within it. Because
of his antipathy to the failures of some Christians, Vahanian
totally negates the infinite accumulation of the Christian trea-
sury of good works, beginning with the divine-human, priceless
life and deeds of the God-Man down to the humblest prayer
uttered by the sinner in the rear of the Church.

Vahanian has stripped God of his lovable and even human
characteristics. God for him is no longer Father, Son, Advocate
and Lover of men. Vahanian’s God is so totally removed from
the affairs of men that it is impossible to contact Him, much
less to pray to Him intimately. Vahanian should read the mys-

396 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tics; they would remove the blinders from his eyes and melt the
ice in his heart. They would teach him that God is not an absen-
tee landlord who is so sociologically and anthropologically in-
different to mankind that he might as well not exist at all.
Vahanian, besides isolating man from God, also isolates man
from man, despite his vaunted concern for a cultural revolu-
tion as a social event. For in contradiction to the whole familial
and social nature of salvation as it is revealed in the Old Testa-
ment in the history of the Chosen People and in the New Testa-
ment in the history of the Mystical Body of Christ, Vahanian
divorces the life of Christian faith from adherence to any
known community or people of God. He has atomized Chris-
tianity by secularizing it. He advocates religious individualism.
His is an individualistic, secularized faith. Now a faith of this
kind need not necessarily have any relationship to the tran-
scendent God; it could be an ideal of mere naturalistic cultural-
ism or humanitarianism. Such a faith is no more than an ideal
for personal and social betterment. Vahanian thus has reduced
true religion to mere diverse manifestations of human cul-
tures. Vahanian is a reductionist theologian; he dilutes the Gos-
pel into becoming a program for cultural betterment.
Throughout all his works, it becomes clear that the doctrines
of Vahanian suffer from extreme ambiguity. Precision is not
his gift. The word Christianity, for example, is used so fuzzily
that one has to read three and four times to try to be fair to the
author’s thought. For the most part, Vahanian inveighs against
Protestant Christianity, but then he switches suddenly to Cath-
olicism, makes no distinctions in doctrines and blankets all
Christian sects in his sweeping condemnations. Vahanian
raises many questions, answers almost none. Indeed, his forte
seems to be to act the iconoclast against false idols, but he is
unable to bring back the true God. Vahanian has in effect re-
duced the Christian God to absolute impotence. So weak has he
rendered Him that the God who revealed himself in Christ and
the Holy Spirit is represented as never being able to raise up
again into vigorous faith the Church He founded in His Son and
through the power of His Holy Spirit. For Vahanian informs all
mankind—and God for that matter—that post-Christian cul-
ture is here to stay. The powers of the Trinity, the graces of
Christ’s sacrifice and sacraments, the prayers and good deeds

Vahanian: God’s Cultural Pallbearer 397

of the Communion of the Saints are impotent to renew the face
of the earth in a revival of Christian civilization and sanctifica-
tion. In his attempt to prove that the God of Christianity ne-
gates all religious systems, metaphysical, religious or cultural,
Vahanian tries to prove too much. In effect, he proves nothing
and remains repeating over and over again in an almost com-
pulsive incantation that Christianity is dead, dead, dead. He
never demonstrates why he believes what he believes nor why
what he believes is fated to remain forever. Vahanian wel-
comes the demise of traditional Crhistianity with an almost
morose pleasure; he celebrates its burial and with the sword of
his pen stands guard over its sealed tomb lest the imposter rise
again. He is dogmatically sure Christianity is dead but there
gnaws at his spirit the fear of its resurrection. With the impos-
tor dead and buried, Vahanian calls for a new program for
faith. He writes: “What is needed is not so much a theological
reformation as a cultural revolution. . .Western culture, the
paraphernalia of faith in God, is at last expiring. . -Accordingly,
the transfiguration of culture is the most urgent task of the
present day. But this is a cultural task; it cannot be the result
of any revival. To this task we are all obliged. It is the cultural
obligation of post-Christian man, be he theologian or not, Chris-
tian or not.” In the final analysis, it appears to me that
Vahanian with religious fervor puts his faith no longer in
Christianity or the God of Christianity but in a self-contained,
humanistic, religionless naturalism which he represents as the
new, worldly, historical transcendentalism.’°

9. Gabriel Vahanian, “Beyond the Death of God, article in The Meaning of
the Death of God, Protestant, Jewish and Catholic Scholars Explore Atheistic
Theology, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, a Vintage Book,
1967), p. 11.

10. Robert Adolfo, O.S.A., “Is God Dead,” article in The Meaning of the Death
of God, p. 88.

CHAPTER XVI

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Altizer :
Mortician of a Mystic God

VAHANIAN'S THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS SEEM THE
acme of urbane analysis when compared to the prophetic vi-
sions of Thomas J. J. Altizer. Moving from right to left—from
Vahanian through Cox, Hamilton, Altizer to Van Buren—we
discover a continuum of Death-of-God theologians which di-
vides into “soft” and “hard” radicals. Hamilton, himself a
“hard” radical, gives us this distinction. Vahanian and Cox are
“soft” radical theologicans for they use the “death of God”
phrase with quotations around one or both of the nouns. Hamil-
ton, Altizer and Van Buren are “hard” radical theologians for
they drop all qualifications and state simply that God is dead,
if indeed He ever existed.’

Dr. Thomas J. J. Altizer, an Episcopal layman, formerly
Professor of Bible and Religion at Emory University, not only
gets rid of God in his theological activities but also elaborates

1. William Hamilton, “The Shape of a Radical Theology,” The Christian
Century, LXXXII, October 6, 1965, p. 1220.

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 399

and presents a religious world-view of his own undertaken
from the very inception of his theological adventures. He has
been described as a “profane mystic” or “apocalyptic prophet”
writing “pure poetry” which is “beautiful” but “unintelligible”
theology.” Hamilton himself has described his fellow “hard”
radical theologian as being “mystical, spiritual and apocalyptic
... all élan, wildness, excessive generalization, brimming with
colorful, flamboyant and emotive language.”* Yet despite the
roar of agitation and exaggeration in the Altizian apocalypse,
a rather consistent, though unacceptable, theological message
comes forth from the storm. It has to be considered seriously
for its genuine Christian elements, refuted vigorously for its
theological nihilism and rejected out of hand for the goal it
would attain—an inhuman, chaotic, illusory humanism—
Nietzche’s horrifying eternal recurrence.

Altizer’s new, religious world-vision arises from his dis-
turbed conviction that a life of authentic Christian faith is no
longer possible in the Church of traditional theology. The tradi-
tional message is irrelevant to the tenor of the times and the
thinking of contemporary man. Yet since the Christian Church
insists on teaching traditional theology without regard to its
lack of impact on current thought, it must be accused of engag-
ing in a form of irrational faithlessness. It is scarcely surpris-
ing, therefore, that the reaction to this traditional stubbornness
has been a revolt against the Chruch, its dogmas and morals.
At first the revolt took the form of indifference to the tradi-
tional teachings and practices of the Church. Today an aggres-
sive assertion that God and the Christian era are dead and
buried has succeeded to that indifference. Altizer testifies to
this change thus:

If there is one clear portal to the twentieth century, it is
a passage through the death of God, the collapse of any
meaning or reality lying beyond the newly discovered
radical immanence of modern man, an immanence dis-
solving even the memory or the shadow of transcendence.’

2. Thomas W. Ogletree, The Death of God Controversey, Abingdon Press
(New York: 1966), p. 75.

3. William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer, Radical Theology And The
Death Of God (New York: The Bobbs—Merrill Co. Inc., 1966). pp. 31-32.

4. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gosple of Christian Atheism, (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1966), p. 22.

400 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Out of this cultural situation which links the death of God
with the demise of faith in transcendence, Altizer moves to
confront the new theological situation. He is convinced that
both these deaths ought to be the principal themes of the new
Christian theology. Now it is his conviction that the Christian
situation will be bettered only from a perspective on the Gospel
message which arises and is pursued from outside Christianity.
Altizer, therefore, proposes to study the Christian faith through
its comparison with other world religions. Only through a com-
parative religion course of study will Christian faith be redis-
covered and reinvigorated. The darkness and chaos of our era
have amply demonstrated that the God of traditional transcen-
dence and the Christ of the Gospels are both dead. Modern man
will just have to open his eyes, come to terms with the harsh
reality of the day and seek both God and Christ only in the
events happening in the world of today. This means, of course,
the heart-rending break with thousands of years of traditional
faith; it demands self-severance from the Church as the Mysti-
cal Body of Christ and people of God; it calls for a break with
the Biblical idea of divine authority. All this entails the danger
of plunging oneself into theological nihilism, the madness of
atheism and captivity to collectivized tyranny. Altizer foresees
and fears these dangers. But he insists that true faith is always
tested through the risks it undergoes. Moreover, the revival of
true religious consciousness can only be achieved from the
tomb of the dead God. For when the door of a transcendent
religious vision is slammed shut, horizons to secularized reli-
gious consciousness dawn with infinite expansiveness. Out of
the ashes of religious traditionalism, religious secularism will
arise, Religious secularism is the womb that will give birth to
a new contemporary community of revived Christian faith.

Altizer has thus committed himself to an impossible task. He
intends to found a secularized Christianity by severing his roots
from Scripture, Christian tradition, the Primitive Church, the
Church of contemporary witnessing and from all traditional
credal and sacramental professions of faith. How does Altizer
propose to perform this impossible task? He proposes to break
all ancient molds and to dissolve all ancient Christian institu-
tions. For example, he announced the coming of a new commu-
nity of faith in which a new Word will arise. In it the isolation

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 401

and segregation imposed by the traditional Church will be over-
come. The canon of revelation, considered as completed and
closed by the traditional Church, will be reopened to reveal the
new, secular revelations contained in the Gospel which are
meaningful for modern times. Moreover, the narrow human
walls of the Church, restricted as they are to the baptized, will
be knocked down in order to admit and embrace as a true Chris-
tian any person, baptized or not, who lives an authentic human
existence. Holy Scripture will be reinterpreted to make clear
the secular significance of Revelation. The creation of this dar-
ing new vision of Christian faith will achieve the triumph of
secularism over traditionalism, that is, the triumph of man
over decadent Christianity.

The Death of God: A Suicide

According to Altizer, Nietzsche was wrong on one very im-
portant point. Man has not killed God, heroic as that deed might
have been. God died by His own hand. The death was an act, or
rather a process, of divine suicide. While comparing Oriental
Mysticism with Biblical Eschatology, Altizer found that the
fundamental idea of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, indeed
of all religions, centered on the ultimate identity of the Nothing
and the All. Religion is merely the dialectic between these two,
breaking forth into the synthesis of advancing faith. True, the
movements of the Oriental and the Christian religious con-
sciousnesses travel in diametrically opposite directions. For
Oriental Mysticism is a radical rejection of the world whose
actualities are seen as illusory, substanceless shadows. Among
the Orientals “the fallen” are those living immersed in the
concrete. The sacred are those who recover the ultimate, un-
fallen Totality of Being—the eternal, quiet, inactive Totality of
all being. In comparison with the kaleidoscopic variety and
concreteness of the world’s actualities, the Totality of Being
must be called Nothingness, the primordial Non-Being. And
paradoxically this Non-Being, this Oriental ultimate Reality,
can be spiritually recovered only by men who sever themselves
from the transitory realities of this concrete world and lose
themselves in the eternal, peaceful, anonymity of the Totality
of Nothingness. Thus Oriental mystics move up from imma-

402 g THE GODS OF ATHEISM

nence in the real world, out of concrete consciousness, away
from thought, volition, sensation, back from the achievement
of personality toward the transcendent dissolution of their very
persons into the Totality of the Supreme Non-Being. And this
self-annihilation is accomplished in a dialectical manner, i.e.,
through an affirmation of the world that negates and radically
transforms it. The profane, its separateness, its individuality,
its consciousness are all annulled in order to affirm the Totality
of the Sacred Non-Being. It is only through such a dialectic that
the essential identity of the profane world with the Sacred
Totality is disclosed. Only thus does negation achieve affirma-
tion. By negating the profane world the Oriental Mystic
plunges into the self-annihilating sea of the Sacred.

Continuing his speculative exploration into the nature of the
dialectic between the All and the Nothing as this is revealed in
Christianity, Altizer finds that the Incarnation, the central
event of Christian faith, propels man in a direction diametri-
cally opposed to that of Oriental Mysticism. Here the drama of
history consists in the movement of the supreme All down-
ward. The Sacred, the Transcendent descends into the profane,
the concrete, the transitory. Here the Creator is seeking his
creatures; in Oriental Mysticism the creatures are seeking
their Supreme All. The advent of the Divine Word orients man
toward process, history, change, activity, eschatological des-
tiny. Here consciousness is heightened, intensified and the
drama of personal commitment and decision is of tragic impor-
tance. Here there is no movement backward, no escape to a
peaceful, prior Reality untainted by time. The Incarnation is
the realization of the highest intensity and intimacy of partici-
pation in the adventure of faith, of salvation, of humanization.
Christians, thus, do not accept the Oriental vision of retirement
into quietism and self-annihilation. Their Supreme Being is not
a static, world-rejecting ultimate Reality. Christians rather
affirm the advent of the Sacred Reality into time, into human
flesh. Even at this moment this Sacred Being is in the process
of achieving His own and His fellow men’s sacred destiny in
history. This Sacred Reality is God as revealed in Jesus Christ,
the Incarnate Word.

As might have been surmised by this time, the principle that
pervades and moves the Altizian theory of religion as a world

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 403

process is expressed as the “coincidence of opposites” (coinci-
dentia oppositorum). Micea Eliade, in his studies of ancient
religions, impressed Altizer with the working of this principle
at the heart of all religions. It demonstrated so well the dialecti-
cal conflict between the sacred and the profane. Thus for Al-
tizer the latest and most perfect synthesis of this principle is
the following: The sacred will be recovered in this broken
world, where God has died by His own hand, only through the
welcoming and full application to all strata of human and cos-
mic existence of the process of secularization in the modern
world. Therefore, the full meaning of the dialectic is realized
when the opposition between the sacred and the profane is
resolved in the “coincidence of the opposites.” In Christianity
the ultimate between the two is achieved in the death of God,
when God annihilated His transcendence and Himself through
His incarnation, immersion in time and the historical, imma-
nent rejection of his total Otherness. In a generous act of self-
sacrificing love in behalf of His creatures, God has gladly
destroyed His transcendent, divine nature, plunging into secu-
lar, profane flesh. Spirit has moved into flesh and flesh into
spirit. Both spirit and flesh are now immanently transfigured
in a new unity, the unity of “Word and History.” Whereas for-
merly Altizer saw the death of God as a cultural fact, now he
sees it as a perfectly willed and planned process of the formerly
transcendent God. Through the Incarnation of His Word and
His Word’s determined choice of His own death on the Cross,
God has annihilated Himself. What has finally happened today
is that cultural, social and philosophical, but above all, theolog-
ical atheists have come to realize that the divine suicidal event
was initiated at the moment of the Incarnation. Moreover, con-
trary to traditional Christianity’s teaching, there is no return
through resurrection from this death of transcendence. And
traditional Christianity’s attempts to celebrate a resurrec-
tional and ascensional recovery of transcendence are but a
self-deception of enormously cruel proportions foredoomed to
lead men to despair and social suicide.

Altizer expands and completes his theory of the secular
world process as the triumph of immanence over transcen-
dence, profaneness over sacredness, man over God by an ap-
peal to three men whom he accepts as authentic prophets of

404 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

that secular Christianity which has displaced forever ec-
clesiastical Christianity. His radical Christian heroes are
Blake, Hegel and Nietzsche. Hegel contributed to the Altizian
vision the goal of the union of spirit and flesh and the dialecti-
cal method for achieving this union. Hegel’s negations succeed
in accomplishing the death of God, the incarnation of Spirit
and the identification of God with Jesus the man. It is in the
dialectic of contradiction that the Trinity and transcendence
are annihilated. In this dialectic divinity descends to Jesus and
through Jesus to humanity. Man now has a new and final
rebirth of the Christian Word. The new Word is the ever recur-
ring reality of further Incarnations which continually negate
previous manifestations of the Word in order that the Word
may become flesh anew in each new secular event. William
Blake, the English mystical poet, confirms the Hegelian-
Altizian vision of Christianity. To the “kenotic” Christology
which emphasizes the emptying of divinity process accom-
plished in Jesus, Blake adds the identification of the now total
immanent God with Christ. “God zs Jesus.” God is now so fully
poured out into creatures that he no longer exists as the Other,
the Person, the All. This divine self-annihilation is an act of
supreme love and grace. Christians alone can realize the enor-
mity of this self-oblation of God on behalf of His creation. The
God who was formerly transcendent and wholly Other has now
been transformed into the forward movement immanent in the
process of history. God has now become Nietzsche’s Nay-saying
to the supernatural world and Yea-saying to the human world.
Through the Hegelian dialectic, the Blakian identification of
divine and human, the Nietzschean revolt against the Divine
Transcendence and choice of the human, Altizer announces the
death of God and the liberation of the profane cosmos from the
jealous God of Judaism and the rigorous God of Christian pre-
destinationism. Such a God of traditional Christianity can only
be viewed today by modern man as a Satan who would restrict
the creative activity of all men or as an Anti-Christ who, unlike
Jesus who liberates man, would impose on mankind the en-
slavement of dread, chaos and death.

Following through with the logic of a “kenotic’”—divinity-
emptying—Christology, Altizer develops a revolutionary inter-
pretation of Christ’s presence in the contemporary world.

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 405

Christian faith can no longer be bound to the events of the past.
For all previous manifestations of Christ have been negated,
indeed, surpassed in the dialectical process of the immanent
secularization and profanization through the absorption of the
divine in the world. Today Jesus Christ is no longer to be ad-
hered to as the Divine Word of God. For God is now dead and
no longer has a Word. Today Jesus Christ meets each man in
the events of on-going history. Jesus Christ, his own ever pre-
sent Word, has negated all former expressions of faith in Him-
self. As ever present in a forward-moving process, Jesus Christ
has moved history and mankind through the narrows of the
death of God and has opened up the vast sea of secularization
to their faith. Thus today Christian faith consists primarily in
the celebration of the death of God. Both Nietzsche and Blake
saw Jesus as the abolition of all distance between God and man.
Blake spoke of Jesus as the great affirmer cf life who by his very
death created a universal family of Man, a community of love
and brotherhood. Thus Jesus is no longer the Son of God of
traditional Christianity. He is the center of the universal
family of man. Any modern appreciation of the presence of
Jesus in history must now be a humanity-centered vision of a
man in whom there was no resentment, no denial of the world,
no “alien” God. Altizer writes on this point:

True, our history has progressively but decisively dis-
solved every sign and image of the Christ who was once
present in the Church. Yet the name of Jesus can continue
to embody the innermost reality of faith if it can make
concretely present the total union of God and man, even
if that union should finally obliterate the God of a former
faith. As the God who is Jesus becomes ever more deeply
incarnate in the body of humanity, he loses every sem-
blance of his former visage, until he appears wherever
there is energy and life.5

But in order to emphasize and make permanent Christ’s on-
going “process-presences” in the world, Altizer had recourse to
the abhorrent Nietzschean idea of the Eternal Recurrence.
This doctrine demands the eternal repetition of all events in an
endless. cycle of existence and non-existence, of life, death,

5. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

406 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

resurrection—a revolving, monotonous wheel of fate which
goes in no direction, has no meaning and reduces cosmic and
vital processes to sheer chaotic flux. In the face of this circle
of absurdity and captivity the reality of Eternal Recurrence
drives man to an agonized “Nay-saying” to life and the world.
On the other hand, man’s “Yea-saying” is for flight into the
oblivion of the primordial Totality. But Nietzsche challenges
man to do the very opposite and heroic deed to the natural deed
he would perform. Man will only truly affirm his love for life
when he says “Yes!” to the horrors of Eternal Recurrence, when
he wills Eternal Recurrence, when he calls it back with the
words: “This is how it was! This is how I want it forever!” Thus
the Nietzschean man wills each moment in all its concreteness,
especially the present moment, for only thus can he prove his
love for life. Joy in the Eternal Recurrence is the proof that
man accepts life with all its ambiguities, tragedies and absurdi-
ties. Thus those alone are truly redeemed who can dance, like
Zarathustra, in joy over the Eternal Recurrence.

Altizer accepts Nietzsche’s challenge and interprets his say-
ing, “Being begins in every Now,” as a truth which manifests
that the center of life is not elsewhere, not in the past, not in
the future, not in certain events of the Old and New Testa-
ments, but everywhere and “eternity” is in every Now. Thus in
meeting the on-going Christ in each present moment man en-
ters into eternal life. Each present secular moment and event
reveals the sacred at the heart of the profane. Time, process
and space transform present moments into the plentitude of
the sacred. Altizer’s new profession of faith becomes, “I believe
in Christ present in this moment as the center of life here and
now and nowhere else. Because of this belief I love the world,
I embrace its tragedy, its absurdity as an epiphany of the body
of Christ.”®

Christian faith today believes, therefore, that God is dead,
that he has been absorbed into the fullness of the life-process
of the world. The true Christian, the one living his faith accord-
ing to Altizer, is now identified with the true Nietzschean, with
Zarathustra. For both are forever pledging themselves in a
“Yea-saying” to life, the world and Eternal Recurrence as they
meet the Jesus immanent in the presently occurring events.

6. Ibid., pp. 155-156.

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 407

Every moment the new Christian embraces each new epiphany
of the immanent Christ. The true Christian is wedded to the
flux of existence; this process is his destiny, his joy, his reward.
The true Christian professes his faith in Jesus Christ, the Word-
process who is continually negating his past and creating new,
even contradictory, expressions of himself. Here, then, is the
religion of Altizer. It is a religion which totally rejects tradi-
tional Christianity. It is a religion with a total adherence and
allegiance to the cult of newness. Let us now attempt to evalu-
ate it in the light of objective historical thought and of revela-
tion.

Assessment of Altizian Atheism

Altizer’s Christian atheism is sometimes described as an
original form of Christian faith. This new faith aims at reveal-
ing a third mission in the presence of God—or to be more exact,
an endlessly new coming of Christ in a world completely desa-
cralized. The new presence of the Christ-Spirit is a process
given essentially in each instant, in our present, our time, our
existence. Christian faith, therefore, no longer consists in ad-
herence to Divine Persons but in apprehensions of the Divine
Process. In a moment we will assess this new faith’s claim to
originality. For the present, however, we can assert that many
of the emphases of Altizian atheism needed reinvestigation
and restatement. Among them there is the Altizian challenge
for the concrete expression of an authentic Christian faith
committed to the service of contemporary man. Another contri-
bution is the insight that would pursue the study of the way in
which different cultures mold and develop the message of reve-
lation. Of special significance for modern times is Altizer’s
emphasis on investigating the social nature of the Incarnation.
In Gabriel Marcel the renewal of the study of the mystery of the
Incarnation had, long before Altizer, led to an inspiring and
fruitful development of a philosophy of communion and a the-
ology of community. Through his deep reflections on the mys-
tery of the Incarnation, Marcel has plumbed the heart of the
sacred in man and the world in a far more inspiring way than
has Altizer. One wonders if a reading of Marcel might not have
spared Altizer the horrible mistake of confusing the sacred

408 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

with Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. Another plus in Altizer’s
radical theology is his rejection of the false, Calvinist notion of
God as the totally “alien” Other, unconcerned about the devel-
opment of man and his world, who from all eternity predes-
tines souls to hell or heaven, not according to the just deserts
of their morally free conduct but according to divine whim.
Altizer is to be praised, too, for reaffirming in a novel but arrest-
ing way a Christian truth emphasized by St. Paul: “Now is the
acceptable time; now is the time of salvation; today if you hear
his voice, harden not your hearts.” The insight that salvific
faith transcends specific times, places, circumstances and en-
dures forever in an adherence to God through Christ is a much-
needed modern reaffirmation of God’s ardent desire to save all
men. True, Altizer erroneously formulates this truth, destroy-
ing the whole, vigorous continuity of the enduring social life of
the faith in the human family which is reborn and consecrated
to the family of God through Baptism and Holy Communion.
There is a coldness to sacraments in Altizian atheism. Despite
these few Christian elements, Altizer’s religion is emptied of
grace.

On a balanced review, therefore, of the whole system, Al-
tizer’s Christian atheism is seen to be anything but original. It
is an eclectic theological patchwork drawn from a variety of
incoherent systems and presented as the new theology for our
age. It is gnosticism dressed in modern clothing. Many of its
elements can be traced back to the times of the early Fathers
of the Church. Altizer’s mystical approach is really his gnosti-
cal approach to God. St. John the Evangelist was already refut-
ing this gnosticism in his Gospel. Gnosticism also originally
claimed to be modern, authentic Christianity. It maintained
that the teachings of the Gospel had to be interpreted and ac-
comodated to the ideas sacred and acceptable to the Graeco-
Roman religious consciousness. For Philo, Jesus was the
demi-urge, not God. He was the Spirit-Word who captured the
intellectual elite through the infusion of a secret, loftier learn-
ing than that possessed by ordinary Christians. Thus belief in
this creaturely semi-God was'not to be equated with the crass
belief of primitive Christians in the Divinity of Jesus, the Son
of God. The Word was God’s cosmic emanation, a creaturely
go-between with a mission to the truly elite among men. In his

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 409

system Altizer performs a marriage between the Gnostic “ae-
ons” and the process of historical evolution. This gives his
Christ-Process-Spirit an up-to-date, fashionable appeal to the
nouveau elite. Yet fundamentally, whether it is Hegel’s dialec-
tically evolving Spirit, or Altizer’s immanently dying God, the
Divine remains a Sacred Reality emptying itself as it moves
through the cosmos and incarnates itself deeper and deeper in
matter and flesh. As for the Gnostics, so also Altizian salvation
consists in liberation from ignorance, chance, petrification and
in insertion into the stream of dynamic change and process
through the secret knowledge available to the enlightened.
Gnostics always break clean from Christian tradition; they are
apostates from orthodoxy; their faith is a philosophy. Gnostics
have no theological roots. Together with the Gnostics of old
Altizer cuts himself off from the theological traditions and wit-
nessing to the true faith, in order to construct an eclectic theo-
logical mélange of his own.

In emptying the Incarnation of its Tri-Personal significance
and reducing it to a mere process, Altizer destroys the human
personal relationship of faith, hope and love in the Divine Per-
sons who remain eternally God after the Incarnation of the Son.
through whom they have now become God “who has pitched his
tent among men in order to live with men and save them.” Men
cannot profess faith, hope or love in a process, for it is the
nature of a process, depersonalized as it is, to invade and subju-
gate its victims. The Incarnation is an I-Thou, God-Man, God-
Me intimate event of love. “He loved me and delivered himself
up for me,” exclaimed St. Paul in a bewildering cry of gratitude
to the Son of God. Moreover, the Incarnation is an event of
history that endures throughout time, not merely discontinu-
ously at each instant. St. Paul celebrates the constancy and
permanence of the Christ of history, “Jesus Christ yesterday,
today and the same forever.” Today’s presence of Christ in
time, in His Church, in the souls of men does not empty either
past history or the on-going process of the present or the es-
chatological approach of the future of the meaning of the mes-
sage He brought and taught in the days of His earthly existence.
The Son of God who had come is the same who is present until
the consummation of the world and the same who is to come
again in power and glory at the end of time. Altizer’s obsession

410 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

to destroy the meaning of the past history of salvation seems
to arise from a blind cult of modernity. He forgets that to be
human means to be endowed essentially with memory. “As
often as you do this,” said Christ to his Apostles at the last
supper, “you will do it in memory of me.” Altizer fails to see
that love means to live in and with the memories of the beloved.
Moreover, to be strong in faith and hope means to live with
adherence to the Person in whom we have placed our faith and
hope, even though the visible absence of the beloved might. be
the occasion for our doubting or despairing in His continued
existence and love for us. In timies of trial and temptation, loss
of memory can lead to loss of faith, hope and love. Indeed, in
such times, loss of memory may lead to loss of selfhood. To
attempt to live outside the vital current of a tradition of faith,
hope and love is to attempt to live without the essential ele-
ments needed for spiritual life; it is to attempt to live a living
death. This existence ends by becoming a chaotic wandering
among unrelated novelties; it is a rootless, rudderless exis-
tence. For after all, the past need not be the enemy of the
present nor a threat to the future. The Incarnation of God’s Son
is the decree of love from all eternity that gives transcendent,
sublime meaning to the whole of time, space and history within
and beyond the confines of the created universe.

In professing that each new epiphany of Christ negates all
previous affirmations of the Word, Altizer is asking men to put
their faith in a meaningless succession of passing moments. If
the Word-of-the-present-moment is entirely different from the
Word-of-the-past-moment and will be followed the next instant
by another totally different Word, then both the identity of the
Word and the identity of the believer are destroyed in the im-
possibility of establishing a conscious, meaningful, permanent
relationship between them. The future is destroyed; there is no
hope possible for the establishment of the Kingdom of God. A
succession of moments in energy and life adds up to epiphanies
of No One, Nobody and Nonsense. It boggles the human intel-
lect and nauseates the human heart to require men to put their
faith and love in meaningless exuberant energy and life, both
of which, as blind forces, can and have already, become abso-
lutes for madmen who have used and adored them as idols.
Nietzsche’s Will for Power is the exact opposite of Christ’s Will

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 411

for Grace. The former destroys meaning, love, joy, communion
and makes divine salvation impossible, for it absolutizes the
lust for a Satanic domination of mankind. Nietzsche’s Will for
Power leads man onto the road of metaphysical nihilism and
dumps him into the pit of moral madness. On the other hand,
Christ’s Will for Grace embraces fallen man, restores his iden-
tity, sanctifies and endows him with a plentitude of intelli-
gence and liberty in a process that divinizes his humanity and
leads him into the ecstasy of a beatific, Trinitarian communion.
Here is an infinitely higher life, a divine energy that achieves
the fullness of meaning, beatific inter-communion of the di-
vine-human families.

In his interpretation of the Scriptures Altizer is guilty of a
glaring oversight. He never adverts to the convenants of love
and fidelity which God has made with man. Both to His Chosen
People of the Old Israel and to His Son’s Christian People of the
New Jerusalem God pledges His love and fidelity. And He never
fails them, though they often are unfaithful to Him. “If we are
faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.”
Therefore, by negating divine transcendence and imprisoning
God in an on-going historical process from which He is no
longer distinguishable, Altizer not only celebrates the death of
God but also the impossibility of God’s remaining faithful to
His people through the convenants He swore to keep with them.
In Altizer’s religion the sacred is no longer possible, for the
All-Holy One is annihilated. And Altizer wants it this way, for
he attacks Christian attempts to regain transcendence and the
Sacred through the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ to the
Father as myths of irresponsible, infantile, primitive men. The
truth of the matter is, of course, that the very nature of tran-
scendence consists in God’s freedom and power to be present
wherever He wills to work without ever being confined to that
work or place or time. Indeed, even man shares this divine gift
of transcendence to some degree, for no matter how limited his
nature, his position, his performance, nevertheless, as a free
and intelligent image of God, man can always aspire to go up
higher, to perform better, to surpass, through spiritual achieve-
ments, the limitations of flesh, time and circumstances. Man’s
reach for the moon and his plunge to the floor of the oceans are
but physical expressions of his metaphysical hunger to em-

412 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

brace the heart of reality in his embrace of the Divinity. The
Incarnation of the Son of God has raised man’s metaphysical
hunger for transcendence to the power of divine infinity.

Perhaps the most despairing aspect of Altizer’s rejection of
man’s divine-human adventure in transcendence is his abject
acceptance of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. Acceptance of
the status quo exactly as it is and forever implies that the man
of Christian atheism has no ideals for the service and better-
ment of his fellow man. With regard to programs for removing
injustices, alleviating tragedies, sanctifying and ennobling so-
ciety, he is forever uninterested and unemployed. His new faith
demands that he say Yes to all as it is. It is the will of the fates
that things be so. And he has made the will of Eternal Recur-
rence his own will. In this position of spiritual prostration
before Eternal Recurrence, the whole glorious Christian vision
and mission for the ethical and sacramental transformation of
man in Christ is extinguished and forgotten forever.

When he reviews the journey taken by his radical theology,
Altizer is honest in admitting that he has traveled a long dis-
tance away from traditional Christianity. He admits he has
abandoned the Church as the Church continues to understand
herself, the prolongation of the Incarnate Son of God in history
until the end of time. He no longer sees the Church as Christ
represented her in His appearance to St. Paul on the road to
Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And Paul
said, “Who art thou, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you
are persecuting.” Having destroyed the personal identity of
Jesus and the social identity of the Church for the sake of his
up-to-date process-Word and process-believer, Altizer gladly
admits his apostasy from the continuity of the Mystical Body of
Christ. But he insists that this apostasy to his new perspectives
of faith is a form of fidelity to the new and true meaning of the
Gospel message for modern man. On closer analysis, we find
that we have an interesting dilemma in Altizer’s profession of
a new faith. On the one hand, Altizer upraided traditional
Christianity for being irrelevant to modern man because it
continually regressed to a pre-incarnate form of the Word, to.a
Transcendent God, to a dualism of flesh and spirit, profane and
sacred, natural and supernatural. Altizer today heralds the
good news that his Christian atheism has liberated man from

Altizer: Mortician of a Mystic God 413

these heremetically sealed dogmatic dualisms through the
deaths of God, transcendence and a restrictive, particularized
Church. Now if regression is a grevious theological fault, how
is it that Altizer invites the modern Christian to regress to
Gnostic mysticism and Hegelian idealism and to put his faith
in these old, discarded dogmatic systems? How is it that Altizer
finds pre-Christian monism more Christian than Christian du-
alism? One wonders whether, in the last analysis, Altizer’s fe-
verish theology announcing, “God is dead” differs significantly
from Plutarch’s terrible cry, “Great Pan is dead!” Have they not
both slain a mystic false God? A man-made God?

CHAPTER XVII

4
D
é
D
(1
Dy

Hamilton:
Orestean Assassin of God

WILLIAM HAMILTON GLORIES IN THE TITLE OF “NEW
radical Protestant theologian.” As such he is defiant in his re-
volt against his early Christian faith and training, both of
which he rejects as having been hopelessly out-of-date and ill-
suited to prepare him for the thrilling contemporary world. In
the beginning, as a divinity student at Union Theological Semi-
nary, New York, Hamilton was a neo-orthodox, Barthian Chris-
tian. Indeed, in his first book, The New Essence OF Christianity,
published in 1961, Hamilton had not yet become a radical
theologian. In that work Hamilton clearly upholds the exis-
tence of God and affirms the Resurrection of Jesus “as an
ordinary event,” even though he cautiously relegates this affir-
mation to a footnote.!

In an article published in Tke Christian Sckolar in 1963 and
entitled “Daring to be the Enemy of God,” Hamilton tried hard

1. William Hamilton, Tke New Essence Of Christianity (New York: Associa-
tion Press, 1961), p. 55.

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 415

to rescue Mozart’s Don Giovanni for heaven by applying Kier-
kegaard’s dialectic of leaps from aesthetic through ethical to
religious maturity. In the eyes of Hamilton Don Giovanni
seemed to typify the ambiguous state of current Protestant
theologians, neither damned nor saved, but detained perma-
nently in limbo. As for himself, Hamilton was thoroughly dis-
satisfied with the state of theology and refused to be detained
anywhere. He was on an urgent quest “to see if there is anybody
out there.”? In an essay, which proved to be largely biographi-
cal, “Thursday’s Child,” Hamilton came to some startling con-
clusions about the condition of contemporary theologians and
gave an even more amazing exhortation as to what Christians
should do about this situation.

... The theologian today and tomorrow is a man without
faith, without hope, with only the present, with only love
to guide him. I propose that we should not only acknowl-
edge, but will this faithlessness. What does it mean to say
that the theologian in America is a man without faith? Is
he a man without God? . . . He has his doctrine of God,
several of them no doubt, and all correct ... He really
doesn’t believe in God, or that there is a God, or that God
exists. . . Something has happened. At the center of his
thoughts and meditations is a void, a disappearance, an
absence. .. Does the theologian go to church? The answer
is “no.” He may, in the past, have concealed this “no” from
himself by escaping into church work, speaking to church
groups, preaching at church or college, slaking his thirst
for worship and word in more protected communities. But
now he is facing up to this banal answer to the banal
question, and he wills to say “no” openly.?

In 1965 in an interview with Ved Mehta, Hamilton revealed
his rapid development from neo-orthodox to radical theologian.
“T am beginning to feel,” he said, “that the time has come for
me to put up or shut up, for me to be an in or an out.”4 But it
was in 1966 that Hamilton finally decided to become a “hard”
radical theologian, heralding the literal death of God and iden-

2. William Hamilton, “The Shape of a Radical Theology,” Christian Century,
LXXXII, October 6, 1965, p. 1220.

3. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, op. cit, pp. 87-88.

4. Ved Mehta, The New Theologian, (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Also
in The New Yorker, November 13, 20, 27, 1965.

416 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

tifying himself with a new radical theology as the only con-
temporary movement capable of saving man from neo-
orthodoxy’s “alienation” by plunging him into an “up-to-date
theology of social involvement.”

Hamilton’s charges against Barthian neo-orthodoxy were
many and serious. The Barthian God is utterly beyond the grasp
of human reason, totally transcendent in all aspects. This dire
God rules a world of tragedy and existential pessimism. He is
the God of that broken-down “good old world of middle-of-the-
road ecumenical neo-orthodoxy.” To be sure, neo-orthodoxy
started out well, as a revolt against liberal theology’s arrogant
assurance that God could be kept in its own coterie of confor-
mism. Neo-orthodoxy, before and after the World War II years,
brought visionary man back to the harsh realities of earth and
heaven. It preached once again the God of moral holiness who
punishes wickedness. and shows Himself in the events of his-
tory as the remunerator of the good and the avenger of the
wicked. For this God of holiness, truth and consequences went
together; there was no escape from moral wickedness. Thus
neo-orthodoxy reminded man that his greatest tragedy was to
choose to become God’s enemy through choice of sin. Neo-
orthodoxy called for absolute, blind faith in God for the power
to achieve righteousness. Liberal self-reliance was a myth ex-
ploded by the horrors of two World Wars. Nevertheless, in
Hamilton’s eyes, neo-orthodoxy, through constant protest
against the modern world, hardened into a narrow, pessimistic
theology. It despaired of any good from the world, from science,
from technology or from natural man. It thus fell hopelessly
behind the times. Hamilton accused neo-orthodoxy of creating
“men skilled in avoiding unprofitable” commitments, careful
about risks, very wise in seeing how not to make fools of them-
selves.” In a word, neo-orthodoxy had become the new compla-
cent, established religion and suffered from the lack of vision
and spiritual sclerosis of any establishment. Its selfish pessi-
mism had no appeal for men in a world where the new battle
cry that moved millions was “social revolution,” no longer
“spiritual alienation.” And Hamilton belonged to the new gen-
eration; he could no longer tolerate the restrictive, out-of-date
pessimism of neo-orthodoxy. By temperament an optimist,

5. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, op. cit, p. 158.

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 417

Hamilton was enthusiastic about all things modern, secular
and human. Hamilton says.“yes” to a world full of new forms
of technology, of the mass media, of great scientific projects
like space conquests and lunar landings. His new theology ex-
udes technological optimism; it is totally involved in all that
happens, accepts change instantaneously, trusts the world, the
future and drives for a world beyond culture, beyond civiliza-
tion, beyond tragedy.

In his break with Barthianism and in his thrilling vision of
the future, Hamilton was aided by his encounter with Bon-
hoeffer. He enthusiastically accepted Bonhoeffer’s insights
about the role of God, religion and the Church in relationship
to man’s noble mission to humanize the world. With Bonhoeffer
he rejected a traditional God who comes to man as his needs-
fulfiller or problem-solver. Augustine was wrong. Men’s hearts
are not necessarily restless until they rest in such a God. The
empirical fact is that modern theologians have not been able to
find or locate any religious a priori, or part of self or part of
human experience that needs God. “There is no God-shaped
blank within man.’* Moreover, the biblical God abandoned
man even as man clung desperately to Him on the precipice of
faith or despair. What is more, however, is that in today’s world,
which moves rapidly from the sacred to the secular, from the
cloister to the world, God is superfluous; He is simply not
needed. “My Protestant has no God, has no faith in God, and
affirms both the death of God and the death of all forms of
theism. Even so he is not primarily a man of negation, for if
there is a movement away from God and religion, there is a
more important movement into, for, toward the world, worldly
life and the neighbor as the bearer of the worldly Jesus.”” God
is thus, at best, demoted to being merely one of the possible
alternatives in the radically pluralistic, cultural milieu of con-
temporary man.

Once again reflecting Bonhoeffer, Hamilton rejects the tradi-
tional God because modern man has come of age and no longer
needs Him. Modern man can now put his trust in the world as
the fulfiller of his needs, the solver of his problems. Is there any
meaning possible in God? asks Hamilton. Perhaps we can find

6. Ibid., p. 40.
7. Ibid., p. 37.

418 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

a meaning by taking the non-discarded part of a famous dis-
tinction made by St. Augustine. That distinction is between the
useful and joyful aspects of a being, its uti and frui. We have
rejected the God who is there to be used. That God is dead. Yet
almost nostalgically Hamilton opts for the God whom perhaps
one may someday enjoy. He writes:

If God is not needed, if it is to the world and not to God that
we repair for our needs and problems, then perhaps we
may come to see that He is to be enjoyed and delighted in
... Our waiting for God, our godlessness, is partly a search
for a language and style by which we might be enabled to
stand before Him once again, delighting in His presence.®

At the beginning of his career as a theologian while he was
under the powerful influence of Albert Camus, the problem
that most tried Hamilton’s faith in the existence of God was the
problem of suffering, not the thrilling call of a scientific age.
Once he became a radical theologian, Hamilton rejected the
Christian God for being impotent to prevent the suffering of
innocent children. Appeals to reasons of faith which see God
drawing higher good out of physical evil no longer ring true to
modern man who wants honest, forthright answers. The suffer-
ing of the innocent which revealed the feebleness of God led
Hamilton to observe that man cannot live as a Christian for
long without coming eventually to acknowledge the loss of God.

Another area of Hamilton’s theological vision which Bon-
hoeffer influenced most drastically is his view of the nature
and role of the Christian Church in the religious life of man.
Like Bonhoeffer, Hamilton frankly admits that he is alienated
from the Church. Indeed, if he does not completely despair of
any good coming from the Christian Church, he scarcely hopes
for any help at all from it. He examines the Church under three
viewpoints, rejects the first two and accepts the third, which so
dilutes the Christian Church that she is no longer recognizable
as the community founded in Christ. Looked at traditionally as
the community of God’s people, endowed with the marks of
oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity, Hamilton finds
this Church useful as a participator in ecumenical dialogue.
Yet he negates even this small usefulness of the Church when,

8. Ibid, p. 41.

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 419

commenting on the breakdown of organized religion in Ameri-
can life, he says that we are well beyond the time when
ecumenical dialogues or denominational merges can be ex-
pected to arrest this breakdown. Secondly, the Church can be
viewed as being found wherever the Word of God is preached
and the sacraments are administered. Hamilton finds this com-
munal body very beneficial to his calling as a teacher of theol-
ogy. But since religion is no longer necessary for a mankind
moving from the cloister and temple to the world, so also there
is no longer any need for a Church peddling a full-blown, use-
less theology. Finally, the only notion of the Church which
Hamilton finds religiously significant and acceptable is the one
which holds that the Church is found wherever Christ is being
formed among men in the world, even if there are no sacra-
mental ties in this formation.

As Ogletree shrewdly observes, “For Hamilton ... the move-
ment from the Church to the world has usually meant a move-
ment ‘out of the Church.’ ”? Hamilton himself says that “the
theologian of today and tomorrow is neither despairing nor
hopeful about the Church. He is simply not interested. He no
longer has the energy or the concern to answer ecclesiastical
questions about what the Church must do to revitalize itself.”
Hamilton has become a theologian of the world, isolated from
every confessional denomination; he is a Christian according to
his own standards of what a Christian should be in the contem-
porary world—one who works in the world through a commu-
nity of concerned citizens, not for God or religion or eternal
purposes, but for civil rights causes, in wars against poverty,
crusades against war and in other such purely humanitarian
movements.

Though he would detach the individual Christian from mem-
bership in any particularized Church, Hamilton does so for
noble and positive reasons. It is true that Hamilton represents
the modern Godless Christian as waiting, somewhat passively,
in silence and prayer, for the possible advent of the God in
whom one can rejoice, even if one cannot have faith or hope in
Him. Nevertheless, this prayerful waiting is not to be totally

9. Thomas W. Ogletree, The Death Of God Controversy (New York: Abingdon
Press, 1966), p. 36.

10. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology And The
Death Of Ged, p. 88.

420 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

passive. Meantime there is positive work to be accomplished.
The Godless Christian must achieve new discipleship with
Jesus. This is accomplished when the religionless, Godless
Christian binds himself to Jesus, not as to an object or ground
of faith, nor as though adhering to a person, but as standing in
a place, the place of Jesus. This new Christian who has lost
faith and hope, nevertheless, is called upon to maintain love by
imitating the example of Jesus Christ. Jesus took His place in
the world, alongside His neighbor, in favor of His neighbor. The
new Christian is in a very real sense the “lieu-tenant” of Jesus.
Even more precisely, the new Christian has the responsible
task of unmasking, of demasking the Jesus who is hidden in all
human events that take place in and for the world. He has the
noble vocation of becoming Jesus to the world and to his neigh-
bor. This vocation is to be achieved at the heart of concrete
existence, for example, in the fight for civil rights, social jus-
tice, the alleviation of human misery and all such humane
endeavors.

For the theologian who courageously takes up the tasks of
this new discipleship with Jesus, the reward is great. He
becomes a man of maturity. He grows up from the fearful,
hesitant indecision of the traditionally cramped Christian to
the fearless, decisive, clear man of secular, optimistic action.
He moves beyond the anguished quest for selfish salvation to
the heroic duties of humanizing a world. Using literary heroes
to illustrate this graduation from grimness to greatness,
Hamilton says that the new Christian theologian advances
from an Oedipus to an Orestes, from a Hamlet to a Prospero
stature. Unfortunately, in laboring to find secular saints in the
classic world upon whom he could model his own creation, the
godless theologian, Hamilton deformed the god-fearing giants
of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Shakespeare out of all harmony
with the heroic originals of these master-dramatists. With this
in mind, the reader should view the following Orestean theol-
ogy as a zealous Hamiltonian attempt to justify the founding of
a society of godless, churchless theologians.

Oedipus and Hamlet are both torn with inner anguish over
the identity of their fathers, their filial relationship to author-
ity and their duty to avenge crimes committed against them.
Oedipus, driven by the fates, unknowingly kills his father;

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 421

Hamlet kills his father’s assassin. But both these figures are
solitary, sin-obsessed, God-cringing theological weaklings.
They are types which represent the demeaning posturings of
traditional Christians with their excessive fear of sin, wailings
before God and beggings for reconciliation. The time has come
for an end to such theological solitariness and bowing and
scraping before a traditionally tyrant God and traditionally
authoritarian Church: The literary figures whose example can
lead the new theologians out of the morass of traditional servi-
tude are Orestes and Prospero. Orestes boldly, even joyously,
kills his mother, thus cleansing the world of her infidelity. He
has no qualms of conscience, no fear of the gods; he exults in
doing his duty. Prospero, for his part, gladly abjures all myster-
ies, magic and theisms, embracing a religionless, atheistic `
world. So too the new theologians must joyously destroy their
faithless mother, traditional Christianity. With an Orestean
theology they must gladly proclaim the death of God, dissolving
man’s preoccupation with sin, faith, hope, salvation and per-
sonal security. For Orestean theology centers on man for man’s
sake and for the sake of man’s world. Moreover, the new theolo-
gians, in imitation of Prospero, must dare to let God, the tem-
ple, sacraments, dogmas, mystery and the sacred go with joy.
They must run back to their dukedoms of this world, assuming
the princely duties of fostering their secular cities toward post-
Christian, post-cultural, post-civilized milleniums where Jesus
is truly found and served in the neighbor.

This is what it means to be a new, Christian theologian, come
of age. It means to have gone beyond the quest for personal
salvation from sin. It means standing confidently, optimisti-
cally “in a world, in the city, with both the needy neighbor and
the enemy.”!! The new Christian theologian has inverted the
traditional order that existed between God and the neighbor.
Hamilton writes: “We move to our neighbor, to the city and to
the world out of a sense of the loss of God.”!2? No longer is God
the center of human history, of prayer, of human endeavor. The
man Jesus has moved to the center as focus of these activities
and in him, man, our neighbor.

11. Ibid., p. 48.
12. Ibid., p. 48.

422 THE GODS OF ATHEISM
Reflections on Hamilton’s Radical Atheism

How can we analyze Hamilton’s revolt against traditional
Christianity and his venture into a theology of radical atheism?
First, we must notice that there is a fairly frenetic tonality to
Hamilton’s style of thought and expression. He began with the
theology of a faith difficult to maintain before the onslaughts
of a savage yet paradoxically marvelous and scientifically ex-
panding world. On the testimony of his own highly personal,
confessional writings, his faith was revealed as tottering, un-
steady, obscure and transported into a sort of continual flux. It
was a faith of impartial simplicity and progressive gropings,
characterized, above all, by refreshing candor and intellectual
honesty, as it moved from neo-orthodoxy to neo-atheism. He
presented his thought in ardent spurts of personal narration
and reflection, leaving behind undeveloped, uncoordinated
“theological fragments.”

Now thinking in autobiographical fragments does liberate
one for the expression of highly subjective theological pre-
possessions unconnected with any confessional allegiance.
Thus a feeling of irresponsibility for what is said is engendered
in the theologian of fragments; he is uncommitted to any spe-
cific faith or faithful. On the other hand, cut off from a living,
coherent tradition of organic orthodoxy, the go-it-alone theolo-
gian is bound to fall into the pit of theological reductionism
where he usually ends up a hopeless captive of his own contra-
dictory constructions. This is exactly what has happened to
Hamilton. His incoherent fragments of theology have frus-
trated his serious readers and sent off Hamilton himself fran-
tically trying to keep up with the most recent passing theologi-
cal (sociological?) passions. In this critique three theological
theses prominent in Hamilton’s recent work will be reviewed:
the “death of God,” the universal ethical commitment of man
and the nature of the new discipleship to Jesus.

One of the greatest snares of personalistic, fragmentary
thinking is the penchant for the thinker to declare as univer-
sally true what he personally experiences and wants to be true.
On the question of the death of God, Hamilton, it seems to me,
has fallen into this voluntaristic trap. He has experienced the
loss of God as a needs-fulfiller and problem-solver. Many other

[S

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 423

contemporary Christians have had this same experience.
Therefore God is dead in our times for all men. The universal
conclusion is scarcely warranted, even after we have granted
the premises. The conclusion is thus seen to be an irrational,
voluntaristic imposition on objective reality. But perhaps
Hamilton was speaking of the death of God only metaphori-
cally? He makes his position very clear on this point.

We have insisted all along that “death of God” must not be
taken as symbolic rhetoric for something else. There
really is a sense of not-having, of not-believing, of having
lost, not just the idols or the gods of religion, but God him-
self, and this is an experience that is not peculiar to a
neurotic few, nor is it private or inward. Death of God is
a public event in our history.}*

Let us for the sake of further discussion grant Hamilton the
truth that God is dead in our history. “What then shall we God-
less Christians do?” we ask this radical theologian. And the
answer? Simply to wait in reverent prayer and selfless social
action for the neighbor, hoping for the return of the dead God
who may reappear to be enjoyed. But what religious meaning
can there be in waiting prayerfully for the return of a defunct
God? Hamilton answers: “Waiting here refers to the whole ex-
perience I have called the death of God, including the attack on
religion and the search for a means by which God, not needed,
may be enjoyed.”4

The intrinsic metaphysical contradiction and psychological
impossibility in Hamilton’s exhortatory teaching is fully real-
ized when we recall that this same teacher has already insisted
that man is incapable of receiving God with any of his powers.
“There is no God-shaped blank within man” means, if it means
anything, that there is no capacity for receiving God in man.
Moreover, had not Hamilton already taught us that “the break-
down of the religious a priori means that there is no way,
ontological, cultural or psychological, to locate a part of the self
or a part of human experience that needs God”? Now we are
exhorted to wait and pray for a God we could never ontologi-
cally know or psychologically adhere to even if He returned!

13. Ibid., pp. 4647.
14. Ibid., p. 46.

424 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

And we are also further advised to enjoy this God should He
return. But the religious activity of joy in a person is also a
metaphysical and psychological impossibility. For joy in some-
one is the fruit of previous knowledge, faith, hope, love and
communion with that someone. Yet the Godless Christian is
incapable of knowledge, faith or hope in God. Nevertheless, he
is exhorted to rejoice without the absolutely necessary pre-
essentials for the experience of joy. How all this is possible is
perhaps the deepest mystery of Hamiltonian theological frag-
mentations. Moreover, although Hamilton has displayed anin-
tense dislike and unwillingness to live with and reflect upon
orthodox mysteries, he has cheerily come to terms with such
bewildering dogmas of his own creation.

From an insistence on theologizing in isolation from the Bible,
tradition and the Church, the last of which St. Paul calls “the pil-
lar and ground of truth,” Hamilton trapped himself in “God-
talk” that was simply irrational. Again irrevocably cutting
himself off from his traditional and historical roots, Hamilton
challenges man, as a morally committed individual, to give him-
self in love and freedom for his neighbor in the center of this
world’s struggles for civil and social betterment. Salvation is
now identified with social, economic and political progress. This
is another voluntaristic, immanentist corruption of the tran-
scendent truth expressed in the Gospels by Christ as the Son of
God. “This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, Eternal Fa-
ther, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” Hamilton ad-
vances a Gnostic interpretation of Christian salvation. He
replaces eternal life with an historic, future, civil, political and
cultural millenarianism. He subsumes moral good and evil, sin
and holiness, damnation and salvation under the different con-
temporary, evolutionary stages of scientific and social progress.
In such a Gnostic human commitment to worldly, responsible,
developmental progress, there is really no place for original sin,
no need for a Redeemer, no call for a Christ on the Cross in a
blood-letting redemption. And as for the myths of resurrection,
ascension and eternal personal glorification or damnation,
these can be rejected as dreams and fears of primitive, infantile
man. Today man come of age has no need for the comforts or
fears of these theological fantasies. Man needs only himself; he
will be saved solely by the goodness of his fellow man.

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 425

Once again isolation from living traditional truth had led
Hamilton into the land of theological enchantment. His vision
of komo homini salvator, man the sole savior of his fellow
man, is totally unrealistic. Realistic man is fallen man, torn
between good and evil, preoccupied with his own selfish inter-
ests, competing violently with his fellow man for whatever he
can snatch from him. If men rise at times to the heights of
self-effacing love and sacrifice, it is because of the presence of
some divine, redemptive person whose transcendent love and
example of self-donation inspires fallen man to rise beyond
self-seeking to the stance of self-giving. The naiveté of Hamil-
ton’s optimism concerning man’s social goodness to his fellow
man as the sole source of human salvation has been exploded
recently by the escalation in violence, race riots and bloody
revolutions in precisely those countries where more was being
done than ever before—legally, economically, educationally
and socially—for the advancement of civil rights and overall
social betterment. In denying God, Hamilton has effectively
denied the divine dimension of man. Hence his ethics of es-
calating social welfare is incapable of attaining even man’s
social salvation. For man’s social salvation is an important,
though inferior part, of his theological salvation. Ethical social
advancement, cut off from man’s theological and religious ad-
vancement, can very easily succeed in merely exacerbating
man’s terrestrial appetites to the irrational degree where, un-
controlled by his spiritual vision, they erupt in a resentful, ugly,
revolutionary state of greedy madness. Hamilton’s radical
atheism in denying man the food of God, the food of transcen-
dence, drives him into moral madness.

Finally we treat of Hamilton’s decision to establish Jesus as
the central person in his radical theology. Now Hamilton ad-
mits that this Jesus is not divine, not the Son of God; Jesus no
longer is the locus of God’s revelation. And Hamilton even an-
ticipates the obvious, unavoidable challenge to this position. If
Jesus is not God, “Why have you chosen Jesus as the object of
your obedience?” He replies that his sole reason is his free
decision to do so. Here again we have a sort of Sartrean volun-
tarianism that imposes meaning on reality solely by subjective
fiat. Hamilton asserts his option thus:

426 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Jesus is the one to whom I repair, the one before whom I
stand, the one whose way with others is also to be my way
because there is something there, in his words, his life, his
way with others, his death, that I do not find elsewhere. I
am drawn, and I have given my allegiance.'®

An unconditional loyalty given to one human hero rather
than to another doesn’t explain but only states a particular
allegiance. The choice in itself remains meaningless. Why not
Socrates instead of Jesus? Socrates also gave his life freely in
defence of his moral principles. Unless Jesus can be adhered to
as being unconditionally more than mere man, as being divine,
it makes no sense to exhort all men to give themselves to their
neighbor the way Jesus did. Indeed Jesus Himself appealed to
man’s total allegiance expressly because of His divine origin.
“He who sees me sees the Father; he who receives me receives
Him who sent me; he who denies me before men, him will I
deny before my Father in heaven.” Hamilton has chosen to
ignore the overwhelming New Testament evidence that Jesus
called for total allegiance to Himself because he was God. Be-
cause he had chosen the death of God, Hamilton also had to
evacuate the divine in Jesus. He had to reduce Jesus to the
status of a mere man; good, but no longer able to call for the
total allegiance that only the Infinitely Holy One could reason-
ably call for.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that Hamilton’s
Jesus is not the Jesus of the Gospels. Hamilton gives Jesus the
function of being next to the neighbor, in the neighbor in love,
without ever disturbing the neighbor over his addiction to
moral good or evil, his acceptance or rejection of the Father, his
openness to or rejection of the truth. This sentimental, humani-
tarian Jesus is a sacrilegious caricature of the Jesus Christ who
is the Truth in Person. The Jesus of the Gospels parted with His
friends, with the religious authorities, with His chosen people,
with the Roman law, with His very life rather than deny the
truth of His revelation or change in one iota His Father’s plan
for the salvation of the world. Hamilton’s fragments destroy
this Jesus.

15. William Hamilton, “The Shape of Radical Theology,” Christian Century,
LXXXII, October 6, 1965, p. 1221.

Hamilton: Orestean Assassin of God 427

Moreover, true Christianity teaches that before the human
person can find Jesus in his neighbor, he must first encounter
Jesus as Jesus is in Himself, In every man’s encounter with
Jesus, there must eventually come the test that came to Peter.
“Who do you say that Iam?” When a person replies with Peter,
“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” he has found
the true Son of God. For he has entered into communion with
the true Jesus, a communion founded on the basis of revealed
truth. Once a person has found and established Jesus as the
God-Man in his own heart, then, and only then, can a fruitful
search for Jesus in the neighbor be undertaken. Hamilton
makes the fatal mistake of placing the finding of Christ in my
neighbor above the level of my direct communion with Christ
in faith, hope and love. Jesus has already warned His disciples
of this illusion of being able to save themselves and others
without prior communion with Himself. “Without me you can
do nothing; unless the branch remains in the vine, it remains
alone; every branch that is cut off, withers, dries up and is cast
into the fire.”

In effect, then, Hamilton has given man an impossible mis-
sion—the socio-ethical salvation of the world through the imi-
tation of a Jesus who never existed. This superficial, secular
crusade is a cruel hoax and reveals Hamilton’s abysmal loss
both of the significance of man and of the divine romance with
man. For it is only in the intimate I-Thou communion of Jesus
Christ, Son of God, with each person that the family of the
Triune God saves the family of mankind. Only in the sociality
of the Mystical Body of Christ is the human person saved.
Before a man can radiate Christ to his neighbor, he must have
the infinitely Holy Christ abiding permanently within himself.
The tragedy of Hamilton’s fragment is that from irresponsible
“God-talk” about the death of God he has produced illusory
“Jesus-talk” about the socio-ethical salvation of man.

CHAPTER XVIII

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Van Buren: Annibilator of
a Linguistic Deity

WE HAVE SEEN THAT WILLIAM HAMILTON, DESPITE
the ardor of his official rejection of God, remained at heart an
incurable neo-orthodox theologian. For even as the corpse of
the wti—useful—God was being buried, a prayerful Hamilton
kept peering into the wings of the future for the appearance of
the frui—delightful—God who might come to dispel the dark-
ness enveloping the stage of human existence. No such ambigu-
ous inconsistency troubles the lucid soul of Paul Van Buren. A
clinically cool diagnostician of linguistic malignancies, Dr.
Van Buren admitted to Ved Mehta in a recent interview: “I
don’t pray. I just reflect on things.”!

As a fledgling reflector, Van Buren did his theology under
Karl Barth, taking his doctorate at Basel and producing a very
orthodox thesis on Calvin’s doctrine of Reconciliation. Then he
discovered linguistic philosophy in the Philosophical Investi-
gations of the later Wittgenstein and the writings of the whole

1. Ved Mehta, The New Theologian.

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 429

British school of linguistic analysts. After subjecting his neo-
orthodoxy to the light of linguistic criticism, Van Buren, ever
the seeker of greater clarity and precision, rejected Barthian-
ism completely and wrote his Secular Meaning of the Gospel,
the book which, he tells his readers, “represented an important
step in a personal struggle to overcome my own theological
past.”? As to the progress of his theological thought since the
publication of this book in 1963, we must be content to speculate
in wonder as to how really radical Van Buren has become,
tantalized by his statement to Mehta: “What I am thinking now
is a lot more radical than what I said in my book.”?

As a professor, he has moved from a teaching post at a theo-
logical seminary to one in a secular university, convinced, with
Hamilton, that religion must move out of the cloister into the
world. His move symbolizes the shift of his theological empha-
sis from Church to city affairs, from ecclesiastical to cultural
significance. He has chosen the community of scholarship over
the community of faith. In his mind there can be no return to
traditional theology; the scientific, empirical attitude is here to
stay; nostalgic traditional regressions only alienate secular
Christians and isolate the Church. Today secular Christianity
has a completely new mission; it must foster a radically secula-
rist vision in its faithful. Van Buren is quite blunt about this
matter as is evidenced by his totally secularist interpretation of
the Gospel message. He is not in the least interested in making
converts to Christianity. He wants to make secular and non-
secular Christians radically more secular. His basic dogma is
that, in order to be an up-to-date Christian, a Christian in the
truest sense of the word, the faithful must let that mind be in
them which is in the twentieth century empiricist. And what is
the caliber of that mind? It is characterized by the qualities of
clarity, hard-headedness and honesty. It concentrates on all the
reality there is, the realities of this world. Thus, it is incapable
of finding “any empirical linguistic anchorage” for the tradi-
tionalist’s visions of transcendent beings—God and his super-
natural satelites. If they are to catch up with the dynamic,
prevailing outlook and enjoy a profitable rapport with contem-

2. Van Burean, “Theology in the Context of Culture,” The Christian Century,
LXXXII, April 7, 1965, p. 429.
3. Ved Mehta, op. cié.

430 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

porary, cultural, technologized society, the Christian Churches
will have to undergo a major metamorphosis. They will have to
abandon dedication to apologetics and evangelism. In place of
that sterile mission, they will have to foster in their members
a Godless, secularist, intéllectualisit vision of man and his sur-
rounding world. j

As it has for other modern radical theologians, Bonhoeffer’s
religionless Christianity served as the bridge over which Van
Buren traveled from traditional to atheistic theology. Van
Buren expresses admiration for Bonhoeffer, the theologian who
refused to retreat from a' world “come of age” and had the
courage to begin a “nonreligious interpretation of biblical con-
cepts.”4 Indeed, Van Buren was inspired to answer the question
posed by Bonhoeffer but which he himself could not answer
because of his untimely death at the hands of the Nazis: “How
can the Christian who is himself a secular man understand his
faith in a secular way?”5 Although he rejected Bonhoeffer’s
separation of religion from the Christian faith and used a
method in answering his question “far removed from Bon-
hoeffer’s thought,” Van Buren, nevertheless, felt that he re-
mained true to his mentor’s theologically pioneering spirit.
True, Bonhoeffer never arrived at a Christian atheism, but then
he never had the time to develop the inevitable conclusions
arising from his theological adventure in secularization. Van
Buren makes use of his mentor’s great initial thrust into the
world and arrives at a consistent “Christian Atheism.” For him,
as we shall see, God is dead in the very real sense that modern
empirical thinking can find no place for the idea of a transcen-
dent Being in any of its enterprises. An idea that answers to no
empirical reality has to be discarded, for it is meaningless.
Such is the sad status of the word “God.” Man is not obliged to
play impossibly irrational language games. Why then keep in
current coinage a meaningless word that represents a non-
existent Being? Yet there are some profitable and truth-attain-
ing language games and Van Buren excels in playing the
analytical language game which dissolves the image of God.
And Nelson expresses the effect of Van Buren’s work thus:

4. Paul M. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1966), pp. 1-2.
5. Ibid, p. 2.

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 431

So God has been edged out of the world, nor has he suffered
death as a historical event. He seems to be like Julian
Huxley’s depiction of the deity: “the last fading smile of a
Cosmic Cheshire Cat.” The Cosmic Cat is gone, the smile
fades, the vacuum alone remains.®

The Language Game in Which God Dies

In the critique he undertook of the idea of God, Van Buren
proceeded in the same manner as the “logical postivists” who
established for themselves “a principle of verification” that
would determine the truth or falsity of human statements. Ac-
cording to this principle, only those propositions have meaning
which can be verified in empirical experience. Of course, other
statements involving formal definitions of concepts and opera-
tive in the relationships between these concepts are also mean-
ingful. Of such a nature are mathematical and logical state-
ments. Thus, a proposition is meaningful in a factual sense if
we can empirically identify, expose and analyze observations
which constitute evidence of its truth or falsity. All other
propositions, apart from purely formal ones, are meaningless.
When this principle of verification is applied to Christian theol-
ogy, and especially to statements about God, we must conclude
that the term “God” is meaningless, for no experimental facts
give evidence of its truth or falsity.

However, to this principle of verification as enunciated by
the logical positivists, Van Buren has seen fit to add a distinc-
tion of his own between cognitive and noncognitive proposi-
tions, thereby expanding the types of verification. Now
cognitive propositions are about existing data and say some-
thing about reality independently of the speaker’s own atti-
tudes or feelings. Public, objective evidence can verify these
statements. On the contrary, noncognitive statements are not
about reality as such but about a given way of looking at reality.
These propositions propose a point of view which is subjective
and define a practical meaning which can be verified in an
entirely new and subjective way. Since personal stances are so
predominant in such statements, one viewpoint on life cannot
be proved objectively on empirical data to be true or false, good

6. J. Robert Nelson, “Deicide, Theothanasia, or What Do You Mean?” in The
Meaning of the Death of God (New York: Vintage books, 1967), p. 198.

432 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

or bad in comparison with another viewpoint. For the meaning-
fulness of noncognitive propositions arises from the conduct of
the speaker of these propositions. If the speaker’s behavior is
in consistent harmony with his statements, then his point of
view is verified in his own life. If his behavior is consistently
in contradiction to his statements, then his statements can be
taken as false. In summary, the test of truth in noncognitive
statements consists in whether a person practices what. he
preaches.

When applied to the word “God,” Van Buren’s expanded posi-
tion on the principle of verification has annihilating effects.
Certainly assertions about God are not subject to objective em-
pirical proof. Consequently, such statements tell us nothing
about reality in the empirical world. It must be, therefore, that
the word “God” belongs in noncognitive statements, those, that
is, that express a particular subjective outlook on life. But even
in noncognitive statements the word “God” is most misleading,
for it seems to be compatible with anything and everything the
human attitude or viewpoint wants it to mean. This is precisely
the sad status of neo-orthodoxy’s affirmations concerning a
transcendent and wholly other God. Moreover, existential
statements about God, such as those of Bultmann and Ogden,
force God to undergo “death by a thousand qualifications.” The
same is true of Whitehead’s process-philosophy terminology
about the Deity. Literally and unqualifiedly, then, the word
“God” is useless, dead. For the sake of clarity, the word “God”
should be dropped. Once such a useless expression is removed,
man can then analyze more profitably and creatively his own
subjective attitudes and viewpoints. In Van Buren’s thought
this means that statements about God are really to be trans-
lated into statements about man. God-talk is really man-talk. In
his interview with Mehta, Van Buren said: “I am trying to argue
that it (Christianity) is fundamentally about man, that its lan-
guage about God is one way—a dated way, among a number of
ways—of saying what it is Christianity wants to say about man
and human life and human history.””

Now the translation of God-talk into man-talk should not stop
with its application to the reality of the Supreme Being. It must
be carried further, particularly in reference to the message of

7. Paul Van Buren, Interview with Mehta, op. cit, p. 153.

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 433

the Gospels, to the central figure of those Gospels, Jesus of
Nazareth, and to the central truth of those Gospels, the narra-
tion of the Resurrection. Indeed, Van Buren is willing to stake
the truth or falsity of his secular translation of the Gospels on
the ability of his secular interpretation of the language con-
nected with Easter to withstand the criticism of the theolo-
gians. He writes:

One of the ways in which the New Testament writers
speak about Jesus is in divine and quasi-divine terms—Son
of God, and what have you. .. What I am trying to do is to
understand the Bible on a naturalistic or humanistic level,
to find out how the references to the absolute and the
supernatural are used in expressing on a human level the
understanding and convictions that the New Testament
writers had about their world. For by using these large
cosmological terms in speaking about this particular hap-
pening, this event—the history of Jesus—they were saying
the most that they could say about this man. If a man in
the first century had wanted to say of a certain person that
he had given him an insight into what human life was all
about, he would have almost normally said, “That man is
divine.”!

In effect, what Van Buren maintains by his analytical method
is that the essential significance of Christianity can be distilled
from the Gospels and presented to modern Christians without
any reference needed to the word “God.” For Christianity is fun-
damentally about man, not God. Christianity is about a style of
human existence, about human viewpoints, attitudes, dis-
positions and moral behavior. What makes Van Buren’s theolog-
ical humanism so plausible is the partial truth this oversim-
plified view of the Gospels contains. It is true that God, as the
abstract, Pure-Act Supreme Being has not entered human his-
tory and thus never becomes as such the object of faith and love.
But the God of the Gospels is the God-Man. And in the words of
Karl Barth, this Incarnate God is the God who is “for man,” who
pitched his tent among men, became their teacher, pastor,
physician and partner in a covenant of mutual self-donation. It
follows, in a very true sense, therefore, that since the coming of
the Son of God, all statements about God are inextricably bound

8. Ibid., p. 148.

434 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

up with statements about man. This unique essential together-
ness between God and man achieved in the Incarnation and
consummated in the salvation history of Jesus is eternally in-
dissoluble. Where Van Buren makes his great theological blun-
der is not in linking God-statements with man-statements, but
in doing this in order to reductively obliterate the meaning and
reality of any God-statement. He would divorce God from man
by contending that man exists alone in this universe, without
any God. In his opinion, there is no evidence of any dimension
of reality in the Gospels that testifies to the presence of a
“more” than man in human history. All that.can be found in the
Gospels is a naturalistic, humanistic Christianity. Naturally, if
this Van Buren doctrine is true, then Christianity has lost its
raison d étre; it no longer has any meaning, serves no purpose
and should be dispensed with altogether.

In his Secular Meaning Of The Gospel, Van Buren attempts
to reduce the entire orthodox Christian message of the Gospels
to a network of noncognitive propositions. Thus traditional
Christian theology doesn’t really need God, nor a Divine Risen
Christ, nor a Virgin Birth, nor miracles, nor a supernatural
destiny for man. For none of these assertions can be objectively
verified as real events of history that took place in the empiri-
cal world. Rather, all these myths are merely a subjective view-
point, a way of looking at man and his situation. All these
myths have evolved out of the subjective prepossessions of a
particular historical community, the Christian community. If
one expects to appreciate the special character of this commu-
nity, one must study the history of the man Jesus. Moreover,
even though this history is full of many difficulties, neverthe-
less it adequately supplies man with the lineaments of the real
Jesus and assures him of solid theological conclusions on the
nature of Christianity. Now Van Buren’s picture of Jesus is,
humanly speaking, very appealing. Jesus is an amazingly free
man, immune from the world’s sollicitations and involve-
ments, disentangled from religious rigidities and rituals, se-
renely unclouded by fear or anxiety and, most inspiring of all,
always available to his neighbor, eager to subject himself in
service for others.

Now a man of such noble character will be expected to have
an extraordinary influence upon his fellowmen. This was emi-

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 435

nently true in the case of Jesus. For Van Buren the reality of
what Jesus meant to the Christian Community is the crucial
question for any version of Christian theology. And certainly
Van Buren’s. interpretation of the meaning of Jesus to the
Christian Community reveals his ingenuity at developing his
own brand of secular, humanistic Christianity.

Jesus of Nazareth was a free man in his own life, who
attracted followers and created enemies according to the
dynamics of personality and in a manner comparable to
the effect of other liberated persons in history upon people
about them. He died as a result of the threat that such a
free man poses for insecure and bound men. His disciples
were left no less insecure and frightened. Two days later,
Peter, and then other disciples, had an experience of
which Jesus was the sense-content. They experienced a
discernment-situation in which Jesus the free man whom
they had known, themselves, and indeed the whole world,
were seen in a quite new way. From that moment, the
disciples began to possess something of the freedom of
Jesus. His freedom began to be “contagious.” For the disci-
ples, therefore, the story of Jesus could not be told simply
as the story of a free man who died. Because of the new
way in which the disciples saw him and because of what
had happened to them, the story had to include the event
of Easter. In telling the story of Jesus of Nazareth, there-
fore, they told it as the story of the free man who had set
them free. This was the story which they proclaimed as
the Gospel for all men.?

It is clear that Van Buren teaches that the secular meaning
of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was merely that
Jesus’ followers found themselves caught up in the freedom of
Jesus himself. Within that freedom these disciples themselves
became free men, courageously free to face even death without
fear. Thus the Easter event is not at all a marvelous deed of God
that happened to Jesus. Jesus did not rise from the dead; he is
presently no different than the unnumbered millions of other
dead. But something did happen to the followers of Jesus. In
their minds faith arose now for the first time in Jesus. There
were no Christians before this psychological Easter-seizure of
the souls of the disciples of Jesus.

9, Paul M. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning Of The Gospel, p. 134.

436 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

According to the New Testament, Christian faith first
arose in connection with the event of Easter and after-
wards in the context of the proclamation of that event

. Easter was the turning-point in the way the disciples
looked at and spoke of Jesus; from that. time they saw him
and spoke of him in a new way . . . The one of whom the
disciples spoke in a new way beginning on Easter was the
man whom they had known by the name of Jesus, a man
of Nazareth whose brothers, sisters and parents were
known,’°

When he attempts to explain why the disciples and later the
Christians looked on Jesus not only as a man risen physically
from the dead but also as their Lord and God, Van Buren again
makes use of the metaphor of “contagion.” Christians adhere
to Jesus as their Lord and God through a commitment to live
the freedom they have discovered in him through the event of
Easter. Whereas before the Easter event, the disciples were
frightened and cowardly, now they courageously imitate the
life of freedom and generous self-sacrifice they have discov-
ered in Jesus. Modern orthodox Christians take their allegiance
to the divinity and lordship of Jesus from the psychological
Easter-seizure experienced by the first disciples. Quite clearly,
then, Christian theology, which Van Buren has already reduced
to purely subjective adventures, is now reduced further to be-
ing merely subjective ethics. The new secular Christianity con-
sists, therefore, in man’s acceptance of the challenge to live for
his neighbor after the example of Jesus. But what is so exclu-
sive about Jesus that men should imitate his self-sacrifice for
the neighbor? Others, like Socrates, have freely given them-
selves for the neighbor. Why not make them the supreme model
for ethical imitation? Van Buren admits the truth of this objec-
tion, but places the uniqueness of Jesus in the fact that Jesus
is a free man who set other men free. Because of his role as
liberator in the Christian Community, which no other man can
share, Christians have always and must always imitate Jesus
as their supreme model. Of course, when Christians so exalt
their model that they call him God of God, Light of Light, very
God of very God, they are merely being over-enthusiastic to-
ward the man Jesus who has liberated them. In reality, how-

10. bid., pp. 116, 117.

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 437

ever, Christians understand man, his life of dignity and ‘free-
dom, his history, the destiny of the world, indeed of the whole
creation, to be the beneficiaries of the “contagious freedom of
Jesus.”

In summary, then, for Van Buren, Christian theology is not
founded on truth-revealing cosmological or metaphysical prin-
ciples. Nor is it founded on marvelous events of history which
can be empirically verified, despite the contrary claim of tradi-
tional Christians. No, Christian theology, and the faith spring-
ing from it, is merely a special human perspective upon man.
The traditional Christian faith constitutes merely a particular
point of view regarding the human condition and destiny. This
point of view is founded on no empirically existing God; it does
not arise from any supernatural intrusion of the Supreme Be-
ing into history. There have taken place no marvelous miracles
that testify to the eternal, other-worldly destiny of man. No,
this particular vision of man arises from the excessive enthusi-
asm of Jesus’ disciples who were profoundly changed through
their experience of “the contagious freedom” of their master.
On the other hand, the modern secular Christian who rejects
all supernaturalism, nevertheless chooses to participate in the
self-sacrificing freedom of the man Jesus. As for traditional
Christians who imitate the self-donating freedom of Jesus,
when they confess Jesus to be their Lord and God, all they are
really doing is proclaiming their own commitment to the man
Jesus and to his generous secular way of life. When they do this,
modern Christians unavoidably invite other men to share their
vision of Jesus, the world, themselves and their neighbors.
Thus, when it has become completely concerned with man and
no longer with God, Christian theology finally becomes mean-
ingful and profitable to man come of age.

Diagnosis of Van Buren’s Linguistic Atheism

In any serious effort to evaluate Van Burens’ annihilation of
God and secularization of the Gospel message, the attention
must first focus on the ideals and attitudes of Van Buren him-
self. As do all the other radical theologians, so too Van Buren
admits to an intense enthusiasm about everything modern and

11. Ibid., pp. 137, 139.

438 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

scientific. His first approach to any theological proposition is
not, therefore, one which asks whether the statement is true,
nor whether it reflects the goodness and beauty of God and
Christ as these are revealed in the Bible, nor whether the par-
ticular proposition has any intrinsic value. Rather, the
predominant psychological attitude is one of subjective prag-
matism. “Is this theological proposition new? If new, is it up-to-
date? If up-to-date, will it suit modern man and find acceptance
in a challenging, audacious, progressive technologized age?” If
the answer to all these questions is affirmative, then the theo-
logical proposition advanced has “cash value,” that is, in Van
Buren’s eyes, it is true. Thus, truth is a category imposed on
theological statements from outside, both from the surround-
ing world of modernity and from the psychological preposses-
sions of the radical Christian atheists who both form and
conform to that world.

The “cash value” norm is applied to God to determine
whether he should be kept or let go. Now, since God is obviously
inoperative in our age and since science is performing what-
ever functions God used to perform, then God is dead; He no
longer fits in anywhere. Van Buren and his theologically radi-
cal cohorts are thus seen to be captives of the current craze for
trends and ideas that are “alive and in the contemporary air.”
Aside from a spiritual revulsion at the immature, crude vulgar-
ization exhibited by this “cash value” attitude towards tran-
scendent truth, one is appalled at how supposedly intelligent
men can seriously adhere to doctrines which are already prov-
ing to be as fickle and short-lived as the popular fashionable-
ness that puffs them. The radical theologians have lost the
sense of reverential wonderment that man should experience
in the presence of the eternal, unchanging, noble attractive-
ness of truth. “What does a man’s spirit hunger more ardently
for than truth?” exclaimed the great St. Augustine. If Van
Buren and his radical confreres could only regain that reveren-
tial wonderment and spiritual hunger for eternal, objective
truth which is enthroned in its plentitude in the Triune God,
then, perhaps, they would also appreciate the humor of Mark
Twain’s announcement when applied to the eternally living
God: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” And
while on the subject of humor, that inimitably witty genius,

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 439

Chesterton, wrote some incisive words about the immaturity of
those who take their truth from the contemporary clock.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of
saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age
but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told,
was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in
the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philoso-
phy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on
Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos
that it was suitable to half-past four. What a man can
believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or
the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law,
he cannot believe in any miracle in any age.!2

So much for the psychological perspective of Van Buren, who
admits his own bias in behalf of “certain empirical attitudes
... for a deep interest in questions of human life this side of the
‘beyond’... and confesses to a corresponding lack of interest in
... the great metaphysical questions.”*

Given Van Buren’s “frankly autobiographical” bias in favor
of secularism and against traditional theology, what can be
said of his method of reducing God-statements to man-state-
ments with the result of eliminating both the being and the
word “God?” His basic epistemological principle seems valid
enough; namely, that assertions compatible with anything and
everything say nothing. Moreover, as applied to irrational neo-
orthodoxy, existentialism and the theology of process-philoso-
phy this principle does expose many meaningless assertions
made by Protestant theologians. But when applied to the ortho-
dox idea of God, to the New Testament and the history of Jesus
of Nazareth, this principle of analysis is utterly sterile for at-
taining truth in these matters. It fails so miserably that we will
show how Van Buren, following his own principle, has been led
to some very startling non-sensical conclusions. We will show
how he has fallen into the very subjectivism to which, in his
opinion, traditional Christians have become hopeless victims.

Contrary to Van Buren’s assertion, the Christian affirmation
of the existence of God is not a “blik,” that is, a fundamental

12. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1959),

pp. 74-75.
13. Paul M. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning Of The Gospel, pp. xiii-xiv.

440 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

attitude or orientation or commitment to see a being in a cer-
tain way, even though empirical reality cannot verify this be-
ing or view of the being. Christians find God in the realm of the
empirical; for them a universe of beings, beauty, truth, order
convinces their reason about the existence of its Author.
Through faith, however, Christians know that God entered hu-
man history in the person of Jesus Christ who infallibly proved
Himself to be God by an overwhelming number of wondrous
deeds and signs, culminating in His physical resurrection from
the dead. There is nothing exclusively subjectivistic about this
knowledge. Certainly this unique God of the Christian cannot
be asserted to be compatible with anything and everything. He
is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, of the Old and New Testa-
ments, unique in nature, powers and transcendent ways of act-
ing. As for the New Testament truth that God was in Jesus, St.
Paul relates his own witness and the eye-witnessing of over five
hundred others who saw, touched, ate and drank with the risen
Lord. Indeed so empirically certain is St. Paul of the physical,
bodily resurrection of Jesus, his Lord and God, that he bases the
life of his mission and of Christianity on the empirical his-
toricity of this event. “If Christ has not risen, then our preach-
ing is in vain and your faith is in vain.” The early Christians
gladly subjected their beliefs to concrete empirical tests; there
was nothing blind or esoteric about their faith, grounded as it
was on historical facticity.

For example, how would Van Buren explain the initial, hard-
headed, empirical “blik” of Thomas the doubting apostle? Here
was a man who withstood the first-hand testimony of the other
disciples who were his friends. And he put down some very
concrete empirical conditions before he would even consider
accepting the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. “Unless I see
in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the
place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not
believe.” Such empirical demands ought to satisfy even the
modern, scientifically oriented Van Buren. When, after eight
days, Jesus meets literally each empirical demand of the em-
pirical Thomas, that saintly empiricist cries out to his risen
Lord, “My Lord and my God!” In all truth can Thomas be said
to be expressing on the second occasion a particular view of life
or has something really tremendous, affecting his whole life

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 441

empirically, taken place before his eyes so that factual evi-
dence of the resurrection of Jesus has removed his doubts
forever? Once again applying Van Buren’s epistemological
principle of analysis, the claim of Christians that Christ rose
from the dead is not a statement that is compatible with any-
thing or everything and therefore meaningless. The resurrec-
tion of Jesus is the most unique event in all history and applies
solely to His experience.

Yet despite the overwhelming evidence for its veracity, Van
Buren insists that the material given by the Evangelists on the
Resurrection was “not intended to be documentary evidence of
historical or biographical facts. It was a story in the service of
the Easter kerygma.”4 Mascall, commenting on Van Buren’s
interpretation of the Easter event and on the intentions which
Van Buren has inserted into those early witnesses from a posi-
tion some two thousand years after them, writes:

Van Buren may, of course, for reasons of his own maintain
that this material is not reliable documentary evidence of
the historical or biographical facts, but to say that it was
not intended to be such is to fly in the face of such plain
statements as the opening words. of St. Luke’s Gospel. And
to suggest that the primitive Church deliberately embroid-
ered the simple human life of Jesus with a mass of myth-
ical and largely miraculous material in order to convince
either itself or outsiders of the authenticity of a purely
psychological “Easter experience” is to attribute to the
first generation of Christians a degree of conscious sophis-
tication for which there is really no evidence.®

We owe it to the sharp observation of Dr. Warwick Montgom-
ery that Van Buren’s so-called plausible analytical interpreta-
tion of the Gospel is exposed as being a judgment compatible
with anything and everything and therefore proving nothing.
No matter what incident is taken from the Gospels to disprove
Van Buren’s interpretation, Van Buren will always dismiss
each episode as simply indicating how powerful the “discern-
ment situation” or “blik”, creating a new, subjective outlook in
the souls of the disciples, really was. Even the Thomas episode

14. Ibid., p. 118.

15. E. L. Mascall, The Secularization of Christianity (New York: Holt, Rine-
hard and Winston, 1966), p. 74.

442 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

used above can be dismissed in such a way. The powerful state-
ment of Peter: “For we were not following fictitious tales when
we made known to you the power and coming of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, but we have been eye-witnesses of this grandeur,” can
also be laughed off in this way. Dr. Montgomery goes on to
illustrate the irrationality of Van Buren’s linguistic tactic by
using apt analogies from non-religious happenings. Here is one
of those apt illustrations. `

Or suppose I were to say: “My wife studied art history and
enjoys painting,” and you commented: “You really love
her, don’t you?” “Well, yes,” I would say, “but she does have
artistic interests. Here are her transcripts representing
art courses she’s taken, here are paintings she’s done, and
...” At which point you interrupt with a sweep of the hand:
“Come, come, no need to bother with that; I can recognize
true love when I see it!” My composure would be retained
with great difficulty, since I would find it impossible under
the circumstances to get across a genuinely factual
point.'*

What Van Buren is telling modern, come-of-age man is that
his viewpoint, that of secular empiricism or empirical secula-
rism, if you prefer, is the only authentic way of interpreting the
Gospels. Even though he is forced to admit that the disciples of
Jesus looked upon their own experience of Easter in a far more
objective and simpler way, nevertheless Van Buren insists on
forcing his “blik,” his “categorical commitments,” upon their
experience through the uncritical use of linguistic empiricism.
We have seen that in his secularist reconstruction of the Gospel
events Van Buren has been “hoist by his own petard.” For his
reductionist translation of the empirical language of the Gos-
pels whereby he reinterprets the divine, historical events of the
Incarnation and the Resurrection into non-cognitive, subjectiv-
istic statements of the primitive Christians only reveals his
own non-cognitive, artificial, irrational, biased viewpoint
against these same historical events. Throughout his work, Van
Buren is almost never critical where the empirical and secular

16. John Warwick Montgomery, “A Philosophical-Theological Critique of the
Death of God Movement,” in The Meaning Of The Death Of God (New York:
Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 51-52. This splendid article has helped this study on
the radical theologians immensely.

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 443

are concerned. But once let the supernatural become the sub-
ject of inquiry and he loses all semblance of empirical objec-
tivity. Then he discovers in the Gospels, in Jesus, in traditional
Christianity whatever he wants to find there. “The idea of the
empirical intervention of a supernatural ‘God’ in the world of
men has been ruled out by the influence of modern science on
our thinking,” he tells us.” Notice, Van Buren does not say
science has proved God to be impossible. He does say that “the
influence of modern science on our thinking” has ruled out, the
intervention of a supernatural “God” for him. This is an expres-
sion of a personal psychological reaction and attitude in Paul
Van Buren; it is his viewpoint, his “blik.” Apparently, then, it
is not a love for linguistic accuracy, nor a dedication to science,
but a capitulation to the thrilling secularist environment di-
rected by scientific technology that led Van Buren to annihilate
God and evacuate the Gospels of all supernatural. meaning.
And Mascall reminds us that Van Buren caved in to the secula-
rist, atheistic atmosphere despite the fact that he could have so
easily encountered large amounts of serious writing in recent
years that stress the harmony that can exist between science
and theology, writing which shows “no tendency to abandon the
traditional doctrines of Christian theology.”

When we analyze his use of the linguistic weapon for the
accomplishment of his reductionist crimes, we discover that
Van Buren was not even faithful to Wittgenstein’s principles.
His classification of propositions into cognitive and non-cogni-
tive in order to suppress the use of the word “God” falsified
Wittgenstein’s honest concern to accent and describe the multi-
plicity of linguistic forms. Both Ogeltree and Montgomery take
issue with Van Buren for misrepresenting the genuine contri-
butions of Wittgenstein to the study of the “Language games.”
Montgomery takes issue with Van Buren for changing the
meanings of certain language games in an arbitrary way to suit
his own purposes. In his eyes, Van Buren’s unwarranted reduc-
tion of the Gospels to the structure of psychological sub-
jectivism has landed Van Buren in the pit of artificial non-
sensicality. Ogletree takes issue with Van Buren’s interpreta-
tion of theological statements. He insists, in opposition to Van
Buren, that theological statements can be understood as saying

17. Paul M. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning Of The Gospel p. 100.

444 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

something objectively true about the nature of reality. And
since this is so, it follows that the word “God” is not necessarily
misleading, nor can it be reduced simply to subjective attitudes
and viewpoints. In attempting to prove too much, therefore,
Van Buren has proved nothing. God, the divinity of Jesus, His
bodily resurrection and the transcendence of the Gospel mes-
sage are as alive today as they ever wére. Van Buren has merely
revealed his own inadequate, narrowed viewpoint, his personal
“blik” against God and the supernatural.

In conclusion, we should take notice of the pertinent similari-
ties among the radical theologians. Why have they all chosen
man in preference to God? Interestingly enough, each of these
theologians was at one time in his life under the weighty influ-
ence of Barthian neo-orthodoxy. And each revoluted against
this influence. Why? Alasdair MacIntyre gives an incisive ex-
planation:

We can see the harsh dilemma of a would-be contempo-
rary theology. The theologians begin from orthodoxy, but
the orthodoxy which has learnt from Kierkegaard and
Barth becomes too easily a closed circle, in which believer
speaks only to believer, in which all human content. is
concealed. Turning aside from this arid in-group theology,
the most perceptive theologians wish to translate what
they have to say to an atheistic world. But they are doomed
to one of two failures. Either they succeed in their transla-
tion: in which case what they find themselves saying has
been transformed into the atheism of their hearers. Or
they fail in their translation: in which case no one hears
what they have to say but themselves."*

So the radical theologians were suffering intellectual suffo-
cation within the rigidly closed circle of neo-orthodoxy. For
neo-orthodoxy refused to identify the Word of God with any
human intellectual mission. Faith is a pure gift of God, totally
transcending any human comprehension. But if human reason
cannot grasp the Word of God in any accurate way, then the
Scriptures, like any other human writings, might easily be fal-
lible. Perhaps Christ is after all only a limited man like other
men and his emptying of himself did not involve the putting off

18. Alasdair MacIntyre, “God and the Theologians,” Encounter, London, XXI,
September 1963, p. 7.

Van Buren: Annihilator of a Linguistic Deity 445

of his divine glory. Certainly, intellectually alive men of this
world will not want to be kept in the straight jacket of an
irrational orthodoxy which demands equally irrational reli-
gious and ethical commitments. The God of Karl Barth and
Soren Kierkegaard is so utterly beyond human reason that he
becomes for the faithful the Wholly Other. Intellectual rebels,
within and outside the Church, will reject such a God as tyrant,
unrealistic, non-existent. Hence they will develop first a de-
mythologized God, then a deliteralized God, then a depersonal-
ized God and finally a dead God. For in the last analysis, modern
man in order to attain his mature manhood will have to destroy
a God who frustrates his highest powers and who, above all,
insults his intellect. Yet somehow the nostalgia for Christianity
demands that Godless man remain a Christian. And so a pro-
gram of theological theory and ethical practice is developed by
the radical theologians. It is the program aimed at producing
religionless, atheistic Christians dedicated, like the man Jesus,
to the service of their neighbor. It is the program of Christian
Atheism.

We have attempted to trace briefly the steps in this process-
theology, following it from static, self-enclosed orthodoxy to
open, dynamically evolving, secularist atheism. Theologians
have come a long way in a short time. In the life time of Bult-
mann, they have traveled from demythologization to decide.
Yet we have seen that the reductionist assertions made about
God and the Gospels by the radical theologians are so compati-
ble with anything and everything that they leave man with a
meaningless message and mission. They exhort man to study a
Godless theology, put his faith in a secular, social Jesus, prac-
tice a religionless Christianity, adhere to Christian Atheism
and replace a defunct God with divinized Man.

CHAPTER XIX

The Idolatrous Heart of

Godless Humanism

IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS WE HAVE DEVOTED OUR
research to demonstrating that the great modern apostles for
atheism, each with his own style and genius, have equated their
espousal of atheism with their adventure to achieve man’s
mental emancipation and personal liberation from the tyranny
of a Deity who imposed upon mankind from above the shackles
of crystalloid creeds and moral dictates. Each atheism explored
claims to have liberated man by exposing, and thereby dissolv-
ing, the religious myth which was conceived, born, developed
and maintained through the exploitation of mankind’s infancy
and adolescence. In attempting to control the superstitious
fears that were spawned in the darkness of his infantile igno-
rance, man created the God of religion in whom he could take
refuge from the overwhelming tragedies of daily life. Thus,
God and His transcendent world of beings became man’s
“security blanket,” his “opium” according to Marx, the anodyne
that made this life barely bearable in time on the promise of

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 447

the “pie-in-the-sky” awaiting him as a reward in the next. This
was how God and religion all started, in the days of man’s
infancy and adolescence.

Today, however, man has come of age. The era of superstition
has been superceded by the era of science. Twentieth-century
man is the creation of a long series of happy—and some very
unhappy—happenings, nearly all of them apparently salutary
revolutions. Galileo and Canon Copernicus liberated as-
tronomy and the earth from the static cosmology of Ptolemy
and Aristotle when they demonstrate that the earth, along with
its sister planets, moved around the sun, changing its positional
relationship to the heavenly bodies from instant to instant. The
French Revolution violently changed the confessional State
into the laicized State; the Romantic movement shifted man’s
social focus from being centered on God to a concentration on
nature and man. Science and technology presented man with
the key to a total control of his physical environment. Darwin
exploded the theory of the direct creation of man by God, mak-
ing man’s appearance as a being the inevitable result of a long
chain of evolutionary development of the entire universe,
which is still projecting itself into the future. Even Cardinal
Newman’s Development Of Christian Doctrine introduced the
dynamics of change into the traditional dogmas of the appar-
ently changeless Catholic Church. The American Revolution
liberated the New World from the bonds of the Old and opened
up a whole new continent. In this seminal revolution can be
seen the beginning of the dissolution of the colonial empires of
the great European powers, a dissolution which in our day has
occasioned the rise of a host of newly created nations. The
eruptions of change in the world of politics as the result of two
World Wars have established today two giant hegemonies spar-
ring in collateral localized wars while preparing for a final
international showdown. Social earthquakes have rocked the
worlds of workers, students, races and religions. Is it any won-
der, then, that twentieth-century man sees himself as essen-
tially an activist, the product of progressive process, involved
with ardent passion to his last atom and idea in the cult of
change?

Not satisfied with changing his cosmology, science, society,
politics, economics and art, twentieth-century man decided to

448 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

make the most radical change of all. He decided to change his
God. He discarded the transcendent Deity for the ever-present
deity of man. Twentieth-century man’s divine adventure is no
longer the Absolute Thou of transcendence. His adventure is
the creature Thou, contemporary man. But when confronted
with the assertion that the Transcendent Deity became imma-
nent in the God-Man Jesus Christ, twentieth-century man pro-
ceeded to change Jesus radically. Jesus is no longer the
God-Man. Jesus is the “man for others,” but, note well, Jesus is
only man, not God and not God-Man, certainly not God in the
sense that he is one of the Divine Persons in the Triune God-
head which is absolutely Transcendent. Such a Triune God is,
for the enlightened twentieth-century man, pure fiction.

In an age of supreme optimism about progressive change,
when man has conquered gravity, broken through his own at-
mosphere captured the moon and is already taking close-up
photos of other planets prior to landing there also, it is hardly
surprising that he has made a religious cult, an idolatry, a fa-
natical liturgy of evolutionary development. His new God is the
Future Progress of Man. And he has put his fervent, total, blind
faith in that God. Twentieth-century man is passionately in
love with the God of Change, which he has identified with the
God of Future Progress. He is viscerally violent against estab-
lished, orderly, permanent things; his appetite for the new is
insatiable. He revels in the contradictory because the clash
between contradictories assures him of the experience of
change, of the experience:of progress in the ensuing chaos and
confusion. And this fierce mania for change at any cost has
captured the minds of many of mankind’s leaders—scientists,
philosophers, theologians, statesmen, educators, clergymen
and artists—men, who instead of swallowing all changes as
good and healthy, should be rationally sifting constructive
from destructive change and leading the people to accept only
the new that organically invigorates what is permanent in the
old. But many of these leaders are themselves enthused about
the deification of evolutionary man.

Dr. Edmund R. Leach, prominent anthropologist and provost
of King’s College at Cambridge, exilarated by man’s triumph
over science and superstition, is refreshingly frank about

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 449

man’s present position and role in the worlds of science, reli-
gion and morals. In an article modestly entitled “We Scientists
Have the Right to Play God,” he writes:

The scientist can now play God in his role as wonder-
worker, but can he—and should he—also play God as
moral arbiter? ... There can be no source for these moral
judgments except the scientist himself. In traditional reli-
gion, morality was held to derive from God, but God was
only credited with the authority to establish and enforce
moral laws because He was also credited with supernatu-
ral powers of creation and destruction. Those powers have
now been usurped by man, and he must take on the moral
responsibility that goes with them.!

In explaining why man had to usurp those divine powers of
creation and destruction and why man must accept the respon-
sibility of making and enforcing his own moral rules, Dr. Leach
relies on the famous Feuerbachian thesis which states that
God, after all, was only a projection into the beyond of fearful,
ignorant man’s best qualities. Dr. Leach cleverly exposes the
human functions attributed to that mythical Deity. God as
creator sets the cosmological clock ticking; as lawgiver He pro-
mulgates the moral code; as judge He imposes sanctions on
criminals; as “trickster” He arbitrarily interferes in human
affairs, testing and gathering His own clique of the righteous as
He segregates them from the wicked; as mediator He judges
and saves sinners. Dr. Leach concludes:

These attributes of God are by definition “superhuman,”
but they are nevertheless qualities of an essentially hu-
man kind, The God of Judeo-Christianity is, in all His as-
pects, whether creator, judge, trickster or mediator, quite
explicitly anthropomorphic, and the converse is equally
true: There is necessarily something godlike about every
human being .. . But unless we teach those of the next
generation that they can afford to be atheists only if they
assume the moral responsibilities of God, the prospects for
the human race are decidedly bleak.”

1. Edmund R. Leach, “We Scientists Have the Right to Play God,” The Satur-
day Evening Post, NY., November 16, 1968, p. 16.
2. Ibid. pp. 16, 20.

450 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

Surely the humanist atheist’s ability to dissolve human
bleakness in the future should be easily documented by his
success in dispelling today the gloom of his contemporary fel-
lows. For, by definition, humanists are depicited as saviors of
humanity at large as well as apostles of the individual’s per-
sonal and social freedoms. Therefore we séek iri the record the
degree of atheist man’s humanity to his fellow man. Has Al-
mighty Man’s love and service to his fellow man excelled that
of the Almighty God whom he has displaced? We expect atheist
man’s performance to answer two questions: First, have atheist
humans emancipated and expanded the mind of man? Second,
have atheist humanists enlarged the exercise and enjoyment of
man’s personal freedoms?

Atheist Humanists and the Mind of Man

Has atheistic humanism expanded the intellectual freedom
of man? The compelling weight of historical evidence forces us
to answer No. In so far as atheistic humanism is professedly
busy suppressing the religious visions and convictions of man-
kind, it is the enemy of intellectual religious liberty. For athe-
ism is inherently opposed to any religious thinking that
historically and rationally fosters faith in God. The logic of the
atheist’s denial of God’s objective existence leads him to ridi-
cule God’s existence in the hearts of believers. Of course, many
humanist atheists will claim that their opposition to religious
vision is restricted only to the realm of intellectual controversy
where they feel it their duty to persuade believers to part with
this non-existent mythical Being. As a matter of reality, how-
ever, the atheist intellectual, and above all the atheist profes-
sor, while undermining the religious vision of their fellow men,
are in effect attempting a drastic shortening of the intellectual
horizons of man. They put blinders on man and limit his power
to pierce reality with his metaphysical and intuitional vision.
They cut back man’s vision to a time-space-matter narrowness.
They work to close off all human openings, drives, hungers,
projections in intellectual adventures toward Absolute Tran-
scendence. For they deny both the existence of an absolute
Being beyond man and the presence of a permanent appetite in

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 451

man for the achievernent of communion with that Absolute
Being. Thus, it becomes ludicrous to listen to the humanist
atheist protesting his tolerance of believers in the dictum of
Voltaire: “I heartily disagree with what you say, but will defend
to the death your right to say it.” This is pleasant but ernpty
rhetoric. For, like Voltaire, atheistic humanists revel in de-
stroying the faith of believers, thereby effectively paralyzing
both the capacity and the right of many for personal investiga-
tion into doctrine and meaningful participation in the free ex-
ercise of religion.

At atime when man’s achievements in spatial transcendence
have sent him soaring to the breath-taking horizon of the moon,
at a time when his simultaneous presence on earth and moon
so broaden his vision that for the first time in history man could
both ecstatically rejoice over the full splendor of his earth and
awesomely shiver over the barren desolateness of his moon,
one wonders how atheistic humanists can maintain their zeal
in denying the very possibility of spiritual transcendence. Why
do they continue to close their minds and refuse to suspect—if
not yet see—that man’s triumphs in spatial transcendence to a
new presence on other planets are but magnificent witnesses to
his inner, insatiable, spiritual soarings toward a transfigured
presence with Other Persons? Since they pride themselves on
being open-minded, intellectual atheists ought at least to inves-
tigate the possibility of the existence of spiritual transcen-
dence and relationship with the thrilling transcendence of
science. In this respect believers in God enjoy far greater intel-
lectual vision than their atheist brothers. For the believer in
God accepts the vision of science and harmoniously raises it,
through free, intellectually creative activity in the science of
theology, to the infinite degree of inexhaustible wonderment.
Whereas the atheist, terrorized by intellectual insecurity,
refuses to soar beyond the space-time-matter horizon. His
metaphysical agnosticism and skepticism leads him to deny
man’s capacity to ascend from science and the limited freedom
of praxis in daily life to higher truth or fuller freedom—to the
very plenitude of Truth and Freedom.

Nevertheless, atheists are never sure, no matter how vocally
certain they sound, about God’s non-existence. They are con-
stantly haunted by the fear that they have not really banished

452 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

forever either the presence or power of the Absolute One by
their scientific feats or dogmatic fulminations. The fact that so
many millions still believe in God, including many scientific
geniuses of impressive achievements, is a canker of insecurity
gnawing at their hearts. Thus, the overlords of atheism seize
and propagandize every startling event that seems to foster
their deed of deicide. Apparently comrade Gagarin had specific
orders to see if God were hiding in outer space. Atheist scien-
tists on earth had already demonstrated that he did not exist in
matter or motion or the earth’s atmosphere. It would be one of
the tasks of fellow atheist Gagarin to check on God in outer
space. Astronaut Gagarin’s report to Chief Atheist Khrushchev
was a foregone conclusion. We can imagine his scientific mes-
sage: “Comrade Khrushchev, there is no sign of The Enemy in
outer space. By night I checked every beam of light, every twin-
kle that pierced that ocean of darkness. By day the pitiless sun
uncovered the entire heavens. He ‘is not to be found anywhere
out there, nowhere in the unfolding, receding infinity of skies.”
A jubilant Khrushchev announced this news to the world as if
it were a new scientific fact.

The amused believer is reminded here of the similar re-
sponse of the atheist surgeon who, upon opening up his patient,
complained that he did not find the human soul. Such state-
ments by atheistic scientists are exercises in cynical ridicule.
Far from being scientific, they substitute the reaction of ridi-
cule for the reflection of reason in the hope of destroying the
reality of religion. Of course, what should be obvious to any
honestly intelligent man, believer or unbeliever, is that such
pseudo-scientific reports present a version of God tailored to
the mental capacity of a child; the atheist creators of this non-
God then make their own mythical creation the object of their
frivolous attack.

The most eloquent counter-attack to such babble of atheists
in our days was the lunar liturgy, the prayers of the American
astronauts. In awe and reverence—virtues forgotten by atheists
—they sang the glory of God as they sailed over the cold moon.
In a voyage of half a million miles through spatial silence they
discovered God. In that silent, awesome sanctuary they ex-
perienced the mighty, ineffable, exquisitely gentle presence of
God. They saw Him everywhere—in the blinding brilliance of
the sun, the colorful sparkling gem of the earth, the prehistoric

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 453

ruggedness of the moon, the infernal blackness of the ‘infinite
interstellar spatial seas. Indeed, they heard Him in the very
thunderous sacred silence of space and in the hushed rhythm
of the circling spheres. To a world-wide audience of hundreds
of millions, outside atheistically dominated countries where
this lunar liturgy was banned, astronauts Anders, Lovell and
Borman celebrated God’s creation of heaven, earth, light, day,
night, the seas, lands and all forms of life. And with God they
agreed enthusiastically that “it was good!” In awe, reverence
and filial love they told the whole world what they experienced.
Good? That was the understatement of the centuries. It was
fantastic, stupenduous, magnificent, sublime! Across the centu-
ries they echoed the ecstatic exclamation of the Psalmist: “The
heavens proclaim the glory of God and the firmament an-
nounces the work of his hands.” Some quarter of a million
miles away on the good earth, atheists who heard these prayers
ground their teeth in desperation. So He is there too? Appar-
ently there is no escape from God!

But perhaps the atheistic humanists who are adamantly op-
posed to religious thinking and practice do not suffocate man’s
liberty in other fields of intellectual endeavor? Surely their
visceral hostility to theological and religious thought is re-
stricted to this area of their peculiar prejudice. First, let us
observe with pragmatic boldness some significant actions of
the leaders of the citadels of Organized Atheism to find an
empirical answer to our question. Mao, the high priest of Orga-
nized Atheism in China, announced some years ago an intellec-
tual Spring with the proclamation: “Let a hundred flowers
bloom!” Encouraged, many literary, political, scientific and cul-
tural scholars felt free to expose, each in his own genre, what
was wrong with “the great leap forward” and to suggest how
the movement-could be improved. No sooner had these flowers
reared their varied colorful heads than they were decapitated.
The intellectual Spring had been a ruse to uncover the seeds of
intellectual sedition which the tyrannical overlords were quite
sure were hidden in the soil of their Garden of Atheism. Not
long after this cultural emancipation from dangerously crea-
tive ideas, the Red Guards flourished out of the soil in which
were buried the Red Flowers. The whole world knows how
effectively the Red Guards reduced the intellectual, creatively
free activity of China to zero. In the jungle they created every-

454 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

one was too busy either killing someone else or fleeing madly
to stay alive. There was neither time, nor concern, nor the
conditions to work at the adventure of expanding the intellec-
tual accomplishments of the soul of China.

But perhaps greater intellectual freedom blooms in the Gar-
den of Russian Atheism? Well, let us listen to the latest witness
from that paradise and then consider some recent events of
history. The answer to this question, I assure you, will not be
muddled. In an interview given to the press in London and
recorded on European TV as well as printed verbatim in Italy’s
TV Radiocorriere for September 14-20, 1969, Anatol Kuznetsov,
famous Russian novelist whose works have sold more than
seven million copies in Russian alone, told the world why he
abandoned his native land and all the privileges he enjoyed as
a member of the Writers’ Union of the Soviet Union:

I fled; I am settled here in London because all these privi-
leges—the apartment in the city, the home in the country,
the automobile, the secretary—count for absolutely noth-
ing in comparison with what is the sole purpose of my life:
to write, to write what I please, to write with freedom. In
Russia I could have all these privileges only by compro-
mising my conscience: I wrote only what I was ordered to
write from above . . . Consequently, I wrote against my
conscience . . . Had I remained there I would have gone
mad, perhaps even committed suicide . . . In the twenty-
five years that they published my writings not one of my
works was printed the way I had written it; they were
published with their heads reversed and . . . therefore, I
have decided to reject them all... For that reason what-
ever has been published—the seven million copies in Rus-
sian and the incalculable number of other copies
translated into more than forty languages—I renounce
them all; I reject them all... They are not my works; they
are something I see as far removed from myself... I will
reprint everything here in London, without the cuts or
manipulations made in Russia.*

The bloody Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was touched off
quite spontaneously when the young generation of communist
university students sought some greater freedom of choice in
the academic curriculum. One rather reasonable petition was

3. Anatol Kuznetsov, “Ora Posso Vivere” (“Now I can Live”), interviewed by
Alberto Michelini, 7V Radiocorriere, September 14-20, 1969, pp. 15-16.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 455

the study of their own language and literature and the greater
use of the Hungarian language in the giving of lectures. Be-
cause freedom is contagious, the initial success in this field led
to greater demands for freedom of the press, radio and politi-
cal preference. The atheist overlords could not tolerate these
normal freedoms. In the frightful bloodshed they inflicted to
stifle the voice of freedom twenty-thousand Hungarians were
mowed down with tanks and Comrade Khrushchev executed
newly elected Imre Nagy and General Pal Meter with whom he
had met, ostensibly to form a compromise that would give the
Hungarians the greater freedoms they claimed. From the sa-
cred, inviolable chambers of international protocol the Pre-
mier and his General went to prison and death in one of the
most barbarous crimes of the times.

The monstrous mentality of organized atheism demands the
total submission and even perversion of the creative powers of
man. The Kuznetsov interview is only the most recent re-
minder among thousands of previous reminders that the words
of Valeriy Tarsis are still true today. Addressing Western writ-
ers in general and Steinbeck in particular on the subject of
their naive belief that Soviet writers were free to write as they
pleased, Tarsis wrote in his book Ward 7: “Had he (Steinbeck)
been born a Soviet citizen, he could never have published a line
—he would more likely have been killed under Stalin or have
shared the fate of Almazov today. (No offense meant, Mr. Stein-
beck! A mental hospital is the only place for an honest writer
in Russia nowadays!)4 Writer Tarsis was actually committed
to a mental hospital and fellow-writer Andrei Sinyavsky to five
years at hard labor for expressing ideas against tyranny and
aspirations for greater liberty. In the cities of organized athe-
ism control of the human mind is almost total. Education is a
monopoly of the Party; so are the media of communication,
which are completely censored. Every art, science, congress,
concert, athletic activity, indeed every public activity is pro-
grammed with one-directional determinism—toward propa-
gandizing whatever fosters the coming of the classless, godless
society. In the history of mankind there has never been a more
completely tyrannical control of human minds than that

4. Valeriy Tarsis, Ward 7 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1965). Quoted in the
Special Edition of National Review, “50 Years of Soviet Communism”, October
31, 1967, p. 1185.

456 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

achieved today by the inquisition of organized militant atheism
wherever it has come to power. Organized conspiratorial athe-
ism has brought to consummate perfection the inhuman arts of
propaganda, brain washing and the forced self-accusations of
pre-desired crimes which were never committed by the “ene-
mies of the State” confessing them.

But perhaps it can be objected that the suppression of intel-
lectual freedom in the countries of organized atheism is due
not so much to their atheism as to their political totalitarian-
ism. After all, there are many atheists—even some atheist or-
ganizations like the Humanists—in the West who at least
verbally oppose the organized atheist inquisition against aca-
demic freedom and even fight legal battles for greater individ-
ual freedom. We happily admit that this is true. But we will
have to demonstrate that, according to their metaphysical con-
cept of man, such atheists are acting illogically when they op-
pose the tyranny of their fellow-atheists. On their own
principles they should logically and eventually become tyrants
themselves if, of course, they remain atheists. We hasten to add
that we are not against this pragmatic illogicality and we en-
courage atheists in the West to continue to defend freedom no
matter how long they remain atheists. But we fear, from study-
ing events developing in America today, that many of these
atheists have discovered, whether by force of events or by re-
flection makes no difference, their illogicality and, instead of
giving up their atheism, have given up their illogical promotion
of human freedom. Their false metaphysics of man has finally
pulled their overt actions into logical line and they have be-
come, like their confreres in the East, atheistic tyrants. Why
are we forced to maintain this unhappy conclusion? To find the
answer let us consider the radical opposition between the athe-
ist and Christian understanding of the nature of man and draw
the inevitable conclusions. Then, let us check the record to see
if Western atheists are really defending the freedom of man,
his truly human freedom.

Atheist Man Versus Christian Man

The metaphysical nature of freedom will be radically differ-
ent according to the diverse answers given to this prior and

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 457

absolutely fundamental question: Who is this being, man,
whose freedom we are discussing? What is the metaphysical
make-up of this being the boundaries of whose freedom we are
attempting to chart and even expand? Before we can begin to
define man’s liberty as a freedom from any external restraints
or even as a freedom for such and such goals under such and
such circumstances, it is absolutely essential to know man in
a metaphysically accurate way. Knowing the objective reality
about man’s substantive being means that we come to know
accurately his origin, orientation and final destiny. Now on the
self-evident principle that a being normally acts according to
the dynamic orientation of its nature, powers and appetites we
can conclude that man will be expected to exercise his freedom
according to the metaphysical make-up of his being to which he
adheres with intellectual and emotional intensity.

Now on a careful examination of the claims that the liberal
Western atheist makes for man—we use the word liberal here
in its original sense as indicating one who truly fosters or hopes
to foster greater personal liberty—we discover that the West-
ern atheist is championing a concept of man which is radically
opposed to man as he exists both in natural and revelational
reality. Considered under the light of natural reason, man is
totally a creature down to the inner metaphysical roots of his
being and up to the heights of the plenitude of his perfections.
Thus he is totally dependent always on a Supreme Being and
always partially dependent on other beings for his existence,
powers and activities. As creature man is intrinsically limited
in existence, powers and achievements; thus, his thinking and
willing will always be limited, however great their marvelous
expansion. When we consider man under the light of revela-
tion, we find that the Christian view of man accepts the
findings of reason and adds the contributions of revelation.
Man in Christ is raised above his merely natural powers to a
quasi-divine state of organic life and development. True, he
never ceases to remain fully a creature, but now his nature,
powers and activities are lifted to a higher life and perfection
through transformation in Christ. His destiny becomes the di-
rect vision of the Godhead after death on condition that he
freely accepts God as revealed in His Son Christ and does the
will of God as revealed by Christ during his temporal life of

458 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

trial. Within this metaphysical and revelational concept of
man, man’s liberty is seen to be founded in the liberty of God,
with its exercise limited both by man’s own reason and the
divine plan for the salvation of man through the achievement
of holiness which is adherence to God. Thus, for the Christian,
man’s freedom consists negatively in a freedom from any ex-
ternal restraints that would prevent his reasonable and sacra-
mental development toward God. Positively his freedom
consists in the right to perform all reasonable and sanctifying
actions that will bring him to the direct vision of God in eter-
nity. It must carefully be noticed that man’s freedom is always
limited; it is always subordinate to right reason and the re-
vealed Will of God. Now let us study the atheist’s concept of
man and human freedom.

Man is, for the atheist, totally independent of God, for God
does not exist at all. Man is the end product, the highest result
of a universe in evolution. A collection of atoms, product of
matter in evolutionary progress, man should not be regarded as
a creature, for he generates thought and volition on his own.
Since the movement producing him is eternal, man himself is
eternal. He is thus the author of himself, his own absolute. He
creates his own culture, values, customs, laws and morals. He
can do this because he is endowed with absolute liberty of
thought and freedom of action. Thus man alone defines his own
origin, orientation and destiny. And he defines these entirely
within the horizon of this material world and life which are the
only universe and life that are real. Thus man’s freedom is
absolutely limitless, for subordination to its own decisions is no
subordination at all. Man is thus free from whatever he decides
must not restrain his liberty; he is free for whatever he de-
cides he wants to do. Man is a law, the only law, unto himself.

Now it should be clear that the nature of the freedom de-
fended by the atheist is radically opposed to the nature of the
freedom defended by the Christian. The origin, scope and des-
tiny of such radically opposed freedoms should logically bring
them into intellectual and even physical conflict. Let us now try
to clarify the practical conflict that exists between the athetis-
tic and Christian ideas of human freedom.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 459
Absolute Humanism Road to Absolute Despotism

When the atheist, against the vast evidence of the world in
which God’s “visible attributes are clearly seen,” decides
against possessing the knowledge of God, he simultaneously
arrogates to himself the mission of persuading others to em-
brace his atheism. The mysterious psychological explanation
of this drive to win converts to atheism is that this drive is but
the passionate dimension of the atheist’s decision against God.
His denial of God is simultaneously his assertion of himself as
being above God. His rejection of God is his projection of him-
self into the place formerly held by God. The metaphysical
mystery profoundly explaining the psychological hostility of
the atheist toward God is to be sought in a fundamental law of
all reality. That law can be stated thus: No being can be neutral
to the Source of all being. Being either witnesses to or denies
the Source of all being; being either accepts or rejects the
Source of all being. This law is clearly observed in inanimate
nature where all beings obey, testify to and glorify their Crea-
tor in a manner determined by the fixed laws of the universe.
But this law is even more profoundly and dramatically true of
intelligent beings whose neutrality toward God is made impos-
sible by the exercise of an intellect that hungers for infinite
knowledge and a freedom that aspires to transcendent power.
“He who is not with me,” says Jesus, “is against me. And he who
does not gather with me, scatters.” In confrontation with God
no intelligent being can remain static. By a metaphysically
natural drive its hunger for transcendence is oriented toward
Supreme Being. But because of its gift of freedom an intelligent
being may deflect its drive for the divine away from God.

In this mysterious ability to direct himself in a free manner
lies man’s challenge to give himself to or withhold himself
from God, his challenge to love or hate God. But the decision to
love or hate God does not remain statically within the lover or
hater, for, like love, hatred is also diffusive of itself. And just
as love of God creates a community of lovers of God so too
hatred of God moves to create a community of haters of God.
Both love and hate drive to incarnate themselves in the beings
of others. For love and hate are dynamic metaphysically rela-
tional realities. We can only love or hate the other or all those

460 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

connected with the other. Thus, the true lover of God becomes
an apostle for God; he shares his certitude, faith and love of God
with those he aims to win to God. On the contrary, the real
hater of God becomes an apostolic adversary of God; he radi-
ates his doubt, denial and resentment of God to those he wants
to win to atheism. There is therefore, a profound, metaphysical,
logical and anti-social drive in every form of open or hidden
atheism. Atheists beget atheists just as saints beget saints, just
as men of God beget men of God, and devils beget devils.

It would be a mistake to think that atheists neglect the mind
of man; they do make what seems like a valid appeal to the
reason of their fellow men. In reality, however, upon closer
analysis this appeal to reason is seen to be counterfeit; it is
nothing more than a massive propaganda assault upon the
mind intended to swamp the light of reason with its intensive
passion. Not the compelling force of evidence but the compul-
sive force of passion pressed into the service of half-truths and
downright falsehoods is ceaselessly employed to fashion con-
formity and unanimity of mind in favor of atheism. Conceived
in the initial falsehood that God cannot exist because His being
would threaten man’s being, His knowledge negate man’s
mind, His freedom erase man’s liberty, atheism is born and
advances through an aggression against the mind of man of an
army of arbitrary falsehoods. We need only the witness of Sa-
cred Scripture to demonstrate this truth.

Satan, the father of lies, corrupted himself and legions of
good spirits on the lie that he and they could become God. That
lie begot hatred of God in these spirits and this hatred drove
them to attempt the dethronement of God and the faithful
angels. Their assault against both was a miserable failure.
Christ told his apostles that “I saw Satan like lightning falling
from heaven.” And St. Peter relates that he saw the evil spirits
“being drawn by infernal ropes into the pit of hell.” The at-
tempt to rule heaven without God ended in enslavement in hell
without rule, heaven or God. On the other hand, the faithful
spirits won both heaven and the direct presence of God. “For to
serve God is to reign.”

The historical demonstration of this truth continued in the
drama of man’s fall. Satan knew that God loved man and des-
tined him for Himself. Because God loved man Satan hated

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 461

him. He therefore attacked and corrupted mankind in its head
in order to strike at God and all God loved. Once again the tactic
was the tyranny of the lie, seduction through suasive propa-
ganda: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Man fell
from an exalted innocence and a freedom immune from the
infinite assaults of wickedness into the confining pit of sin. The
same lesson is horrifyingly clear throughout all sacred and
profane history: Whoever strikes against God strikes down
himself. The atheist denying God degrades himself. The atheist
exalting himself above God sinks below the level of animate
and inanimate beings. Liberation from God is enslavement in
creatures, Absolute humanism is the sure road to absolute des-
potism. Denial of God as truth begets the imprisonment of man
in the self-imposed darkness of his own myths. Flight from
total dependence on God guarantees for man the utter loss of
his freedom in a brutal enslavement either to sheer anarchy or
to the tyrant who must eventually arise to impose upon the
chaos of limitless human liberty the artificial, inhuman order
of the concentration camp. We will only profoundly appreciate
the satanic nature of atheism when we realize that denial of
God is not merely an indifferent Nay-saying to God, but a kind
of blasphemous joy at hating God and a thrilling decision to
unite men in a community of enduring hate for the purpose of
banishing God from the hearts of men.

Now the liberal atheists of the West know that the wanton
exercise of limitless freedom can only lead to social chaos.
This, of course, they do not want. Yet, since they cannot appeal
to a benevolently Divine Source of absolute moral values in
order to persuade their fellow men to exercise their freedom
reasonably, the atheists must rely on external pressures to at-
tain a human expression of freedom that respects the rights
and liberty of all. Such artificial, external controls on the exer-
cise of human liberty consist in man-made laws, customs and
fashions, In effect the majority opinion of men prevailing at
present alone restricts the scope of liberty. But history demon-
strates that such artificial controls maintain a rather tenuous
hold on the passions and despotic arbitrariness of man. Moral
values founded solely on such exterior artificial standards are
founded on the shifting sand of popular opinion, subject to the
winds of change at any moment. Moreover, morality by

462 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

majority preference alone is a two-edged sword. It may be con-
structive or destructive of man and society. The sexual moral-
ity popular in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah brought them
to utter destruction. The racial morality popular in Nazi Ger-
many aimed at the extermination of the Jews. Any morality
that depends on the whims of the masses, the spirit of the
times, the instability of circumstances and the accidents of
place is always a threat to freedom, often actually suppressing
it. For, as happens often in times of decay, when all things are
in disarray, there exists in this doctrine of moral relativism no
eternally valid tribunal functioning beyond the tempests of
time and immune from the temptations of tyrants, to which
atheists can appeal for an absolutely just defense of their
rights. The initial tragedy of the atheists takes place in the area
of truth. They deny God as absolute Being and Goodness and
they divinize man. Trapped in this false metaphysics, they
becomes victims of philosophic relativism. Self-enslavement
in the field of morals is an exorable brutal consequence of
metaphysical self-enslavement in falsity. Once again “hoist by
their own petard,” this time in the sphere of moral relativism,
atheists are helpless in trying to guarantee mankind his truly
human goals of justice, truth, peace, prosperity, security or
freedom. For just as absolute truth in the Being of God is the
ultimate rampart against the rampant pretensions of false
ideologies, so too, absolute justice in that same God is the last
court of appeals for curtailing the rampant crime of wanton
freedom. In a morality that appeals to the absolute Justice of
God, men, for the sake of their fellow men, will witness with
their lives to a truth and justice they know exists as eternally
incorruptible and which will certainly prevail, even though it
may presently be crushed under the heel of the tyrant. Whereas
in a morality founded on metaphysical relativism, the tyranny
of the totalitarian state, of the crowd bent on crime, of the
pressure of prevailing propaganda and popular decadence will
be opposed by no rationally sustained resistance of atheists. We
need only analyze some recent tragic history. The apathy in the
West before the utterly absurd absolutist dogmas—not to men-
tion the massive heinous crimes—of Nazism, Fascism and
Communism must be attributed to the West’s retreat from ad-
herence to God by faith and reason. On the part of believers,

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 463

metaphysical and moral relativism weakened their attach-
ment to God and produced in them a startling tolerance of
incredible myths and an unnatural insensitivity to monstrous
crimes. On the art of agnostics, sceptics and atheists, where
their anti-theism did not produce an actual alliance with the
criminals in power, it nevertheless rendered their protests
puny and meaningless, since it was known that, at least in
doctrine, they were themselves advocates of absolutist human-
ism, albeit of a more moderate type. Even today their inability
to resist effectively the assaults of red absolutism indirectly
aids the cause of this tyranny, if only by aiding the myth that
this tyranny is invincible. Atheists have yet to learn the lesson
so brilliantly taught by Dostoevsky through a character in one
of his novels. Schigalev brutally lives out to its bitter conse-
quences the doctrine of absolute revolution promoted in Necha-
ev’s nefarious book, Catechism For Revolution. At the end of
his odious accomplishments Schigalev makes the following
confession: “After starting out from unlimited freedom I arrive
at unlimited despotism.” When man becomes God, history tes-
tifies that then millions of men become imprisoned slaves, ter-
rified automatons and murdered corpses. Society, in the words
of Gabriel Marcel, becomes a “termite colony.”

Atheist Humanism: Cancer in Community Life

When man becomes his own absolute center, then God
becomes his hell, because God sets limits to man’s greatness.
But once having attained autoerotic sovereignty, a monstrous
metamorphosis takes place in atheist man. He begins to feed on
his own fellow men, for they now are his hell, threatening to
rob him of his freedom. When God is rejected because he is seen
as man’s hell, then man, whom God loves, suffers the same fate
and for the same reason. There is a frightening resemblance
between the atheist humanist as a cell of society and a malig-
nantly cancerous cell in the human body. Both cells have
thrown off any service of subordination to the health of the
communities in which they thrive, They act and grow accord-
ing to their own uncontrolled ravenous appetites feeding
parasitically on the whole organism. As runaway cells they

5. Georg Siegmund, God On Trial, p. 420.

464 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

invade and destroy every healthy cell in the body until they
extinguish life and speed to completion the total disintegration
of the unity of the body. Atheist humanism is a psychic can-
cer. It shares two major characteristics with physical cancer.
Both these human cancers arise from the arbitrary rebellion of
a subordinate cell against the established social harmony of the
whole. Secondly, both these cancerous rebellions are metastatic
and messianic in their aggression to the death against organism
andcommunity.

Earlier we indicated that atheist humanism in cutting man
off from communion with God also isolates him from his fellow
man. St. Paul indicates why these twin evils strike humanity
together. Reminding the Roman Christians of those pagans
who refused to accept the true God, he wrote: “As they have
resolved against possessing the knowledge of God, God has
given them up to a reprobate sense . . . so that they do what is
not fitting, being filled with all iniquity ...” He then goes on to
enumerate a litany of heinous, unnatural vices which man,
abandoned by God to the wantonness of his stubborn fallen
nature, gladly, even proudly commits. He tells us that those
practicing these crimes are deserving of death. And history
records that nations, empires, the vast power of Rome itself
sank into oblivion, destroyed by self-indulgent immorality.

This reprobate sense which moves atheists to “applaud oth-
ers doing the same wicked deeds they themselves do,” is the fire
of cancer that is consuming modern nations. The late C. E. M.
Joad, an atheist who returned to God through an exchange of
a series of letters with Sir Arnold Lunn wrote in his book, The
Present And Future Of Religion:

Religious belief is rapidly and palpably on the decline.
Young people in particular are either indifferent to reli-
gion or hostile to it. For the first time in history there is
coming to maturity a generation of men and women who
have no religion, and who feel no need for one. They are
content to ignore it... Also they are very unhappy. And the
suicide rate is abnormally high.®

Moreover, this reprobate sense has created a spirit of fear
and suspicion which is saturating society. The bad fruit of this

6. Sir Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean, Tke New Morlity (London: Blandford
Press, Revised and Enlarged edition, 1967), Quoted by Sir. Arnold Lunn on p. 25.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 465

spirit is everywhere to be seen—contention, violence and disso-
lute sexual decadence. There is a mania abroad for plays, mov-
ies, magazines and T.v. shows based totally on cruelty, violence
and sexual perversion. Part of the explanation for this un-
checked indulgence in cruelty, morbidity and perversion is due
to liberal atheists who, pressing ahead with their false ideas of
freedom, come to the defence of man’s unreasonable expres-
sions of free love, free violence, free looting of property, free
drugs, freedom to subvert society or to drop out of all social
responsibility. Thus, such men have succeeded through the
courts in attaining legal approval for many types of immoral
conduct—divorce as a relief from marriage, abortion as a liber-
ation from the unwanted child, contraceptive services as a pro-
tection against pregnancy, homosexuality for consenting
adults. Moreover, the permissive program of these moral storm
troopers calls for legalized euthanasia, artificial insemination,
the free use of “soft” drugs and many other bills that would
legalize other immoralities. These advocates of legalized im-
morality have attacked some of the most basic natural rights
of man. Their influence on the judicial thinking of the courts
has been most effective. For example, judicial “twistifications”
of such previously well-defined notions as “establishment of
religion” and obscenity have led to United States Supreme
Court decisions which violate the rights of conscience of the
majority in the name of imaginary freedom for the minority.
To argue legally from the clear constitutional law of “no state
religion” to the incredible position of “no voluntary prayer may
be said by children in public schools.” is to degrade the majesty
of law by pressing it into the service of one’s hostility to God
and religion. Father Costanzo, S.J., Professor of Political
Science and Constitutional Law at Fordham University, writes
that such interpreting of the First Amendment “is not only wild
and absurd reasoning but is also contrary to American legal and
natural history, and in direct contradiction of the history of
education in American schools, public as well as private.””
Moreover, the nature, purpose and limitations of freedom of
expression in the communications media and the press have
been so irrationally defined and expanded by the emotional,
sophistical arguments of the legalistic storm troopers with

7. Rev. Joseph F. Costanzo, S.J., “Religion in Public School Education,”
Thought, Fordham University Press, N.Y., Vol. XXXI, No. 121, pp. 18-19.

466 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

atheistic proclivities that it has now become all but impossible
for the Court to recognize obscenity and thus practically impos-
sible to convict anyone of the crime of obscenity. Meanwhile,
a deluge of patently pornographic poison floods the public mar-
ket and, to the frustrating dismay of angry parents and citizens,
corrupts the morals of the nation. Writing from New York on
May 2, 1968, English correspondent Mr. Ian Brodie indicated
why America was fast deteriorating from a puritan to a pagan
society:

The keys to this personality change are a number of Su-
preme Court decisions which virtually outlaw censorship
and decree that obscenity is not illegal... . It is a curious
irony that the Supreme Court, dedicated to preserving the
freedom which is the foundation of American life, has
confused it with license. In doing so it has given its seal of
approval to the sick society which will undermine the
United States from within.®

Leavening the social anarchy escalating in the sick society of
the West are the moral licenses advocated by some prominent
intellectual atheists. Mathematician Bertrand Russell, who
held that “the whole conception of God is a conception derived
from ancient Oriental despotisms ... quite unworthy of men,”®
also defended sexual promiscuity, going so far as to advise
wives to be as unfaithful as husbands. His biographer, Alan
Wood, writes about Russell’s ideas on marriage morals and pre-
marital sex thus:

Russell noted that marital infidelity was traditionally
greater among husbands than wives... it seemed that, to
make all things square, wives should be as unfaithful as
husbands. He suggested that marriage should not be re-
garded as excluding outside sexual relations; and that hus-
bands, instead of restraining their inclinations in this
regard, should confine themselves to restraining any jeal-
ousy at similar infidelities by their wives . . . It was un-
desirable, he said, that either a man or a woman should
enter upon the serious business of a marriage intended to

8. Sir Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean, Christian Counter-Attack, (London:
Blandford Press, 1969), pp. 50-51.

9. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian (London: Unwin Books),
1967, p. 26.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 467

lead to children without having had previous sexual inter-
course; and this view, though still controversial, became
widely accepted in many countries.'°

It is scarcely surprising that Mr. Wood concludes that “more
than anyone else he changed the outlook on sex morality of a
whole new generation.”

Dr. Joseph Fletcher, Professor of Ethics at the Episcopal The-
ological Seminary, Cambridge, Mass., says that good morals all
depend on the situation. He tells us that there are situations
when the last six commandments of God, “any or all of them,”
which normally forbid murder, adultery, stealing, false wit-
nessing and covetousness, may have to be broken by the mor-
ally good man who will act from the motive of tender love, the
motive that makes all human acts good.“Not every pre-marital
sex relationship or theft or fornication or conspiracy to destroy
a lawfully constituted government is evil.” “Every man must
decide for himself according to his own estimate of conditions:
and no one can decide for him or impugn the decision to which
he comes.”!? Here is secular atheistic humanism in a clear,
pure state, for it assumes in each individual the divine preroga-
tives to act as totally as one wills concerning the ways of men.

Herbert Marcuse, philosopher and now fast-fading idol of the
radical Left because “he is unduly suspicious of sexual free-
dom,” nevertheless did not disappoint his student worshipers in
the beginning of his oracular career when he advocated the
free use of drugs as an excellent expression of total protest and
freedom. Sir Julian Huxley, scientist-humanist-atheist, for
whom non-scientifically ‘proven evolution is nevertheless de
fide, is on public record for the future improvement of the
human race through the use of wide-scale compulsory artificial
insemination. The generic intelligence of the race can be raised
by a process of eugenic selection. But in practice how does one
encourage geniuses and bright people to have more children,
especially in an age obsessed with preventing children from
coming along to life? The matter should not be left to the pri-

10. Alan Wood, Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Sceptic (London: Unwin
Books, 1957), pp. 149-152.

11. Ibid, p. 146.

12. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1966), p. 74.

468 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

vate decisions of the more intelligent, otherwise the needed
psychosocial evolution will never develop rapidly enough.
Therefore, eugenics, aided by the coercive power of the govern-
ment, “will eventually have to have recourse to methods like
multiple artificial insemination by preferred donors of high
genetic quality.” !

Dr. Harvey Cox, Professor of Church and Society at Harvard
University, advocates a new allegiance of religious fervor, not
to the City of God but to the Secular City. Man’s devotion to this
new church is to be expressed through the practice of the vir-
tures of profanity and pragmatism. In the Coxian lexicon
profanity defines and celebrates man’s escape from the temple
while promoting a human life guided by the norms of religion-
less morality. Self-achieved salvation is man’s destiny here and
here alone. Pragmatism emphasizes the “come of age” secula-
rist’s program for salvation. It consists in performing great
historical acts of political and social reform. Only through the
spirit of profanity and the performance of pragmatism will
man escape from the tyranny of God and the hypocrisy of
Christian moralism, pietism and legalism. The God in the Secu-
lar City is Almighty Man.

Thus because of the novel interpretations of leading influen-
tial intellectuals, many of whom are robust atheists while oth-
ers, supposedly Christian, are in reality thin theologians
afflicted with a fever for atheism, the sick society of the West
is dying of an overdose of freedom. The essential freedom of
man consists in freedom from God. Freedom for truth consists
in freedom for man-made truth not for transcendent truth.
Freedom of religion is interpreted to be freedom from religion.
Freedom of self-expression is identified with feedom from any
restraint at all in man’s personal and social life. As a result, the
falsity is fostered in the minds of millions that any legitimately
established power or authority is the natural mortal enemy of
man. God, Church, family, State, traditional dogma, morality,
law and even all institutions established for the common good
of man: congress, schools, courts, capital, labor—the whole sys-
tem is represented as being rotten and ripe for revolutionary
burning. In a word, atheistic humanism tends to rot every natu-

13. Sir. Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean. Tke Cult Of Softness, (London: Bland-
ford Press, 1969), p. 65.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 469

ral and social differentiation into an opposition of resentment,
hate and violence. The “affectless society,” that is loveless so-
ciety, soon degenerates into the jungle of inflamed litigation
and overt violent crime. For where atheistic humanism
flourishes there exists a general flight from reason and revela-
tion and that society which St. Paul described in his letter to the
Romans is once again realized as a monstrous reality—a so-
ciety in the throes of its own self-inflicted fevers, dying vio-
lently by its own hand because it has lived lustfully by its own
will “without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.”

Conclusion: The Agony of Godless Humanism

Atheists have introduced a mythical war, a hostile contra-
diction at the heart of the metaphysical-religious-moral-legal
continuum of sacredly ordered being. For them God is the
enemy of man; the divine-natural-moral-law morality is the
enemy of political, social and civic society; positive civic and
federal laws are artificial barriers calculated to maintain social
injustice and prevent needed reform. Thus the atheist human-
ist, when he uses philosophic and religious relativism to deny
God, shatters the complementary harmony that exists in the
metaphysical-religious-moral continuum established by the all-
wise Creator. But this work of demolition does not stop here. For
the atheist is thorough, if nothing else. Now using the battering
ram of legal positivism, he levels the wall of unity that main-
tains the religious-moral-legal continuum of tranquillity. The
atheist humanist is a total wrecker; he aims at destroying those
four towers of strength set up by God and maintained by God-
fearing men for the establishment, protection and development
of man’s life as an adventure toward God in which the spiritual
always takes the primacy over the material. In denying the tri-
une God the atheist would also smash that coherent trinity of
reality—God, man and religious morality—established to bring
man personal peace, social order and divine sanctity. The athe-
ist violently divorces God from man, man from religious morals
and religious morals from positive law, thereby creating three
abysmal spiritual vacuums in the life of man in the vain hope of
setting man totally free. In reality he traps himself in his own
net of despotism.

470 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

The theistic vacuum inevitably leads to the religious-moral
vacuum and these two eventually lead to the legal vacuum.
Almighty Man, swollen with arrogance, rushes in to fill the
theistic vacuum left by the deposed Deity. Licentious hedonism
—eventually in the form of violently idolatrized sex—usurps
the vacant throne of the absolute divine natural-law morality.
Finally, anarchism snatches the reins of lawlessness and,
drunk with the power of limitless freedom, drives the herds of
men through total chaos to totalitarian despotism. Thus do ex-
tremes meet and total human freedom identifies itself with
total human slavery. Such is the brutal, logical, metaphysical-
historical dialectic of atheistic humanism. Via violent revolu-
tionary rationalism, nations have traveled the route from
atheistic confessionalism to laicism to totalitarian Caesarism.
The France that fell under the despotic power of Napoleonic
Caesarism is a classic example. In our own day, deluding seven
million Cubans with the atheistic cry of hope, “Humanismo es
nostra vida,” —“Humanism is our way,”—atheist Fidel Castro
has led a formerly free nation into moral, economic destitution
and the termite slavery of communistic Caesarism. “In a uni-
verse without God,” wrote Andre Malraux, “life is absurd.”
And we add, violently brutal, for when man is his own God,
heads roll and blood flows copiously on the altar of man’s sa-
tanic pride and insatiable lust for power over his fellow man.

Even within its own house of organized atheism, godless hu-
manism will not tolerate any expansion of freedom of expres-
sion or action among its sons of atheism. We have already
considered the classic case of China. The most recent historical
proof of this intransigence to human liberty even for the sons
of atheism is the example of Czechoslovakia. In the late sum-
mer of 1968 a veritable Pentecost of liberating winds was set in
motion for the nation by those sons of the Party, Dubcek and
Smrkowsky; the citizens were heartened with a hope for new
freedom. The Stalinist tyrant, Novotny, was deposed; political
measures liberalizing the communications media were pro-
mulgated; the economy was loosened a bit from the grip of
socialism. Dialogue with free Europe and the whole West began
to flourish. Atheist humanists in the free world were enthusias-

14, Julian Critchley, “André Malraux: A Profile”, The Times Saturday Re-
view, November 18, 1967, Quoted in Christian Counter-Attack, p. 70.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 471

tically comparing the humane communism of Russia and
Europe with that brutal brand in power in China. They saw
fresh hope for the world in the mellowing, the liberalization
taking place in the atheistic humanism in Czechoslovakia.
They predicted another Yugoslavia; that is, another nation en-
joying political, economic, cultural sovereignty yet remaining
within the atheistic humanist hegemony. Here was proof that
atheistic humanism, even in its political incarnation, did en-
courage human freedom.

Suddenly the political and spiritual winds changed. A harsh
freeze set in from the north. That sound from heaven did not
come from the violent blowing of the liberating Spirit; it came
from invading war planes. Those tongues of fire that parted
darkness from dawn were not the polyglot gift of life-giving
dialogue; they were the tongues of tanks, the gun fire that si-
lenced the tongues of national freedom in fear and death. The
new course to freedom was barricaded; the iron curtain was
reinforced with the inner military curtain of occupation. At the
moment of this writing the purge of the heretics from freedom
is in full swing; thousands are disappearing into prisons and
labor camps. Already the leaders for the reforms fostering free-
dom are politically destroyed. Dubcek was expelled from the
Praesidium of the Communist Party and sent to a quasi-exile
as Ambassador to Turkey. Smrkowsky is expelled from politi-
cal life altogether. Moreover, the process of their spiritual
degradation grinds on relentlessly, directed by Quislings em-
powered to obliterate all local voices for freedom. Press, radio
and television are again throttled, echoing only slogans of the
purging Party. Once again atheist humanists of the West are in
a state of shock at the brutal methods of their fellow atheists.
But once again they refuse to draw the metaphysical conclu-
sions or apply the pragmatic rule of evil fruit evil tree.

They refuse to see that atheistic ideology gives birth to the
cult of inhuman cruelty. Nicholas Berdyaev, who suffered at
the hands of Russian atheism, called this religion of secularism
“an inverted theocracy.” And history continually witnesses to
the truth of this description. When Stalin died at the end of a
reign of terror, purges and blood, Mr. Khrushchev, emotionally
shaken by the record of this human monster, denounced in his
famous de-Stalinization report to the Party, the divinization of

472 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

the Party leader which had given Stalin absolute control over
the whole U.S.S.R. Khrushchev complained that the cult of the
leader developed by Stalin had a religious and supernatural
quality about it that made him into a god:

It is intolerable and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leni-
nism to exalt a person and to make him a superman en-
dowed with supernatural qualities equal to a God. Such a
man is supposed to know everything, to think for the
whole world, to do everything and to be infallible. 5

Khrushchev was wrong in one important point. For the facts
of history show that the cult of divinizing the Party leader is not
at all foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, but indeed
natural to it. As Gaston Fessard reminds us, the divinizing cult
of the leader of the Party began the day after Lenin’s death
when all his collaborators canonized him, embalmed him, es-
tablished and created his tomb as a shrine for atheist pilgrims.
In demanding and exacting divine homage, Stalin acted in the
name of Leninism, liquidating, even as Lenin did, all his ene-
mies, acting always as one equal to a god. Moreover, diviniza-
tion inevitably overtook Khruschev himself. Acting as one
equal to a god he conducted purges of his own at his home.
Abroad he chrushed the Hungarian revolution for freedom,
killing some twenty thousand with tank fire. Again in the inter-
national sphere he threatened the whole world with atomic
war over communist Cuba which he saved for Castroite slav-
ery. This is the same Mr. Khrushchev who was in tears as he
narrated the nightmarish cruelties of his former god, Stalin.
What had happened to his protest against the cult of personal-
ity? Slowly, inexorably, under the pressure of atheistic ideology
and in the continuous struggle to suppress the human spirit

15. Gaston Fessard, “The Theological Structure of Marxist Atheism,” Con-
cilium, Burns & Oates, London, June 1966, p. 10. Early in October 1969, twenty
years after his rise to power, a liturgy honoring Mao in China flashed across
the TV screens of the world. In cadenced unison millions of the faithful, regi-
mented at his feet, chanted hymns of praise. Together they projected arms
skyward, the Vangel of Mao’s thoughts in their hands. Cameras caught the
religious delirium in the eyes; sound-tracks recorded the fervor of screeching
voices. Posters, full of savage slogans, depicted comrades crushing heretical
heads, Above it all on his massive altar, divine Mao smiled his Oriental smile.
Never have I seen human divinization and human degradation coincide so
perfectly in so ghastly an atheistic liturgy.

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 473

which is forever striving to break the bonds of enslavement,
throw down its oppressors and transcend into the space of hu-
man freedom, the Party leader evolves from atheist humanist
to despot God. Like a divinized Nero fearful of losing his power
to other gods, he does not hesitate to commit crimes that once
shocked him in his predecessor god. Now, himself habituated
to crime, he liquidated foes, friends, even family. Now it all
seems to easy, so natural, to hurl divine thunderbolts. And he
justifies the most heinous deeds as acts of dutiful fidelity to that
future God who is coming through the historical evolution of
the proletariat—the God of the classless society. True, his athe-
ist comrades removed Khrushchev from power before he could
become totally habituated to or invincibly established on the
throne of his divinity. Nevertheless, in this church of organized
atheism the divinizing cult of the party leader cannot be eradi-
cated; it is the logical, inevitable fruit of man’s madness to
displace the true God. Whether the tyrant human god is divined
through the cult of one person or of that secularized trinity, the
troika, makes no difference. The leader atheist or the troika of
atheists or the Party of atheists or even the Union of Socialist
Republics of Atheism, can as it suits the purposes of the Party
each be magnified into the Divine Being. For, under the pain of
commiting social suicide, some form of cult of human divinity
must be maintained. For without such a cult the ideology of
atheism must surely collapse, since the cult constitutes the
basis of its power.

Atheism is an idolatry which worships that strange God—
absolute Man. There is in the nature of atheism a metaphysical
connection between its arrogant assumption of divinity and its
self-indulgence in egocentric absolutism. For just as the child,
spoiled on the excessive love of its parents, turns upon and
attacks them with irrational cruelty, so too the atheist, spoiled
on the excessive flattery of humanists proclaiming him god,
turns on mankind and brutally victimizes it. At the mysterious
depths of moral wickedness, self-indulgence in absolutism and
boundless cruelty join forces in an allied effort to destroy god
and man. The fact is that humanism without God has not suc-
ceeded in humanizing man; it has succeeded in driving man
insane and putting him to work wrecking the world and his own
great civilization. Chesterton was convinced that when man

474 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

denied God, he would not believe in nothing, but he would be-
lieve in anything. He would, moreover, not do nothing, but as
a fanatic he would do anything, even wreck this world out of
hatred of the nonexistent other. Chesterton wrote:

There are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their
civilization if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale.
This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith;
that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the sword
that cuts their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn
their own homes... He (the atheist fanatic) sacrifices the
very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God.
He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert
the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne.
He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all
things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon
some one who never lived at all.!*

Some forty-three years ago, in 1926, Oswald Spengler, like a
prophet of old called in to advise a king of Israel about God’s
wrath on a faithless nation, wrote, as a salutary warning to the
Western Nations, a diagnosis of the disease that was slowly but
surely destroying them.

You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of
decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great
poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars
and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism
and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down
marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from
the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—
can prove to you that these were characteristic marks of
the dying ages of ancient states—Alexandria and Greece
and neurotic Rome.”

In conclusion, then, the overwhelming weight of past. and
present historical evidence demonstrates that anthropologist
Dr. Edmund R. Leach is tragically mistaken when he claims
that “it has become useless to appeal to God against the Devil;
the scientist must be the sole source of his morality ... Man

16. Mr G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 238-139.
17. Oswald Spengler, Decline Of The West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932),
p. 000

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 475

must assume the moral responsibilities of God.” For, through-
out this study of the many faces of that strange god, Almighty
Man, we have seen that man, in attempting to do precisely that
—be an atheist and his own God—has only succeeded in estab-
lishing an inhuman humanism, a political and religiously per-
verted atheism which violently forces him and that third of the
world where this atheism is the official religion into total bond-
age to the father of lies and the unnatural perversions that lead
on to nihilism. Idol-perverted through the worship of itself,
atheistic humanism practices the licentious liturgy of feeding
its Man-God idol on man-god victims, a sort of divine-human
cannibalism. The adventure of atheism is seen, in the last anal-
ysis, to be that unfathomable iniquity which attacks the very
roots of reality, divorcing things, persons, societies from God
and organizing them into a militant Kingdom of hate that
ceaselessly and sacrilegiously assaults the sanctity of God.and
the dignity of men.

Lenin, that arch-atheist who assessed Christianity as The
Enemy to be destroyed, expressed a profound truth in these
words: “Our revolution will never succeed until the myth of
God is removed from the mind of man.” He certainly had a
clear, total grasp of the messianic drama being fought out
through the ages. Deus delendus est. “God must be destroyed”
is the battle cry of militant atheists. In the last fifty to sixty
years these atheists have attained much success. They have
turned back the great Christian missionary armies from China,
Africa and other foreign lands. China seems completely con-
quered by militant atheism. Russia, Eastern Europe and now
Cuba, formerly Christian, are now part of that third of the
world under the rule of organized atheism. Bad as this defeat
is for the forces of belief, Christianity now seems to be in full
retreat also in the West. In Europe and America the disintegra-
tion of Protestant theology—dogma and morals—before the on-
slaughts of secularism has led to the disintegration of the
Protestant Churches. Europe and America are now highly desa-
cralized areas of the world. Finally, the Catholic Church, in-
fected with the “new modernism,” is being interiorly torn

18. Dr. Edmund R. Leach, “We Scientists Have the Right to Play God,” The
Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1968, p. 20.

476 THE GODS OF ATHEISM

asunder by “a spirit of corrosive criticism that has become
fashionable in certain sections of Catholic life,” according to
the testimony of Pope Paul VI himself. What is alarming about
this criticism is that it attacks not only policies of churchmen
in the Church, but above all casts doubt on the veracity of many
long-established dogmas and morals. It is a crisis of authority
and of faith. It thus appears that the missionaries of atheism
are successfully creating a world culture founded on the dogma
that God is dead.

What can believers do to reclaim the world for the true God?
First, believers must become as clear-headed about the nature
of the struggle as Lenin was. Their battle cry must be: Atheis-
mus delendus est: (Atheism must be destroyed). Second, and
more important, believers must become as effectively militant
against the enemies of God as the Chosen People and the early
Christians were against the idolators of their times. Today
there is need of militant believers. The counter-attack the chil-
dren of light will have to mount must be double-pronged. They
must articulately dispel the darkness created by the propagan-
dists for atheism, using doctrine and history—facts and results
—to unveil the utter insubstantiality and hypocrisy of the athe-
ist cause. Moreover, and above all, believers must witness by
bold deeds of moral rectitude to the majesty and holiness of the
transcendent God and Christ. Their good works must shine
before men, lifting them from the seduction of humanism to
the glorification of man in the Father. What is needed is
“salted” not sentimental, infectious not infected believers and
Christians. Like the Psalmist and prophets of old, like John the
baptist and Christ Himself, believers must challenge and con-
demn the current, popular, heretical nostrums of atheist hu-
manism, preferring to be “with God” than “with it in the
world,” even if in imitation of the prophets, the Baptist and
Christ, their stand for God should cost them the scourge of
persecution and loss of life. For the conflict between atheism
and belief in God ought never to be reduced to a non-decisional
dialogue between intellectual opponents, nor to a choice be-
tween war and peace, but only to a choice between victory and
defeat. The believer must work to kill the error of atheism so
as to share, through persuasion, with the atheist whom he
loves, the joy of possessing God as truth and Love. Moreover, a
victorious faith in God must prepare the militant believer to

The Idolatrous Heart of Godless Humanism 477

pay joyfully the sacrifices of victory, even as a victorious Christ
first willingly endured the sacrifice of the cross.

The ideals and zeals of the men studied, however inade-
quately, in this work demonstrate a profound fact about man:
The most urgent need in man is his metaphysical hunger for
communion with a personal God. Man cannot, and hence will
not, remain neutral to the mystery of a personal Divine Pres-
ence. For this personal Divine Presence alone gives adequate
meaning and mission to his life. This truth was long ago tes-
tified to by God Himself in the company of Moses on Mt. Tha-
bor. Commissioned to sculpt into stone the most important
commandments by which man could live meaningfully and
holily, Moses failed to write the following commandment:
“Thou shall not be an atheist.” Instead his first commandment
read: “I am the Lord thy God . . . Thou shalt not have strange
gods before me.” It was as if Moses had written: “Atheists are
not godless men; they are men addicted to false gods.” Thus, the
battle of love to which the Christian is honorably called today
is the struggle to liberate his atheist neighbors from enthrall-
ment to false gods and to help these neighbors find the True
God. And in order to fulfill this noble mission the Christian may
never forget that the escape from the dungeons of the false
gods to the mountain of the True God demands a persevering,
courageous journey through the desert of self-sacrifice.

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Index

Absolute Thou, 11

Adhaerere, Deo, 140

Altizer Thomas, J. J., 333, 398-
413

The Attack on Christianity, 188

Barth, Karl, 25, 28, 29, 36, 38-40,
318, 319, 354, 416, 428, 433
Being and Nothingness, 220, 223,
236

Being and. Time, 247, 248, 262,
267, 333

The Birth of Tragedy, 47

Blake, William, 403-405

Bolshevism, 119

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 308-328,
348, 363, 364, 417, 418, 430

Bosanquet, Mary, 324

Brandes, Georg, 80, 84

Brave Men Choose, 112

Brinton, Crane, 63

Brown, Harold O. J., 346, 368

Bultmann, Rudolph, 317, 323,
325, 329-347, 349, 350, 354;
361, 389, 432

Caligula, 199, 200

Calvez, Jean-Yves, 95

Calvin, John, 310, 311, 463

Camus, Albert, 195-216, 376, 418

Catechism Of A Revolution, 114,
463

Catholic Church, 118-136

Caute, David, 111

Chesterton, G. K., 439, 473

Christianity and Culture, 390

Christless Cosmos, 18

Churchill, Winston, 136

Combat, 199 5

Commentary on Romans, 318

Communist Manifesto, 129

Comte, August, 37, 142-184, 188,
231, 316, 380

Copleston, Frederich, 39, 82

Costanzo, Joseph F. Rev., 139,
465

Crise de foi, 3

Cross Purpose, 200

Cours de philosophie positive, 37,
142, 157, 175

Cox, Harvey, Dr., 317, 319, 373-
382, 398, 468

Daniélou, Jean, 15, 290

Dante, Alighieri, 125

Darwin, Charles, 61

Dasein, 250, 260, 261, 333, 335,
342

The Dawn, 64

Death of God, 389

Defeat of Communism, 136

de Lubac, Henri, 15, 17, 19, 21,
37, 41, 49, 85, 107, 147, 165,
170, 182, 280

The Devil and the Good Lord, 217,
230, 231

de Vaux, Clotilde, 159, 168, 169

Development of Christian Doc-
trine, 447

Deussen, Paul, 80

Dewey, John, 69

D’Holbach, P. T., 311

Divini Redemptoris, 119

Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 17-19, 55,
90, 91, 141, 224, 463

Dumitriu, Petru, 366, 369

Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Cate-
gories and Concepts, 248

488

Ecce Homo, 44, 69, 80, 81, 218

Ecole Normal Superieure, 276

Ecole Polytechnique, 144

Ego mihi deus, 32

Ehrenberg, Hans, 39

Eliot, T. S., 227, 390

Encontre, Daniel, 144

Engels, Friedrich, 96-99, 107, 129

Esse est co-esse, 296

The Essence of Christianity, 20,
24, 31, 34, 96, 142

The Essence of Religion, 32

Existentialism and Humanism,
220, 224

Existinz, 250, 254

Exploration Into God, 363, 368,
369, 371

The Fall, 211

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 20-41, 122,
125, 156, 161, 188, 316

Fin de siécle, 43

The Flies, 217, 231

Forma mentis, 4

Fortiori, 12

The Gay Science, 50, 78
The German Ideology, 108
Geschichtlich, 337-339
Gide, André, 84

Grand Être, 160, 161

Hamilton, Kenneth, 387

Hamilton, William, 388, 398,
399, 414-428

Hegel, G. W. F., 20-25, 29, 33,
44, 45, 56-58, 92, 93, 121-124,
146, 281, 292, 313, 314, 404,
409

Heidegger, Martin, 247-275, 277,
280, 332, 335

Historich, 337-341

Homo homini Deus, 33, 122, 141

Honest to God, 363, 366, 368,
369

INDEX

The Honest to God Debate, 360
Hume, David, 312
Husserl, E., 247, 249, 277, 280

Imago nihilis, 61
Incarnation, 35

Industry, 144

In Praise of Philosophy, 276

James, William, 69

Jaspers, Karl, 44, 45, 194-196
Jolivet, Regis, 13

Jonas, Hans, Dr., 270
Judaeo-Christianity, 22, 24, 74

Kaishek, Chiang, 114

Kant, Immanuel, 145, 146, 188,
248, 312, 313

Kennedy, John F., 375

Kierkegaard, Soren, 187, 188,
192-195, 202, 288, 299, 318,
445

Krushschev, Nikita, 450, 452, 471,
473

Kuzvetson, Anatol, 454, 455

Lacroix, Jean, 39

La Dolce Vita, 39

Leach, Edmund, R., 449, 474

Lean, Garth, 112, 114

Le Dantec, F., 183

Lenin, Nikolay, 92, 95, 98, 109,
115, 475, 476

Len-soi, 223, 226, 236

Le pour-soi, 223, 226, 236

Letters and Papers From Prison,
320, 363

Le Visible et V'Invisible, 288

Lévy-Bruhl, 171

The Life and Death of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, 324

Life Together, 323

Logos, 42, 171

Index

Lunn, Sir Arnold, 464

Luther, Martin, 310, 311, 345

Lyons, Eugene, 5, 114, 133, 136,
137

Macintyre, Alasdair, 317, 360,
444

Magnolia Dei, 130, 343

Malik, Charles, Dr., 6

Mao T’se-tung, 113, 114, 454

Marcel, Gabriel, 9, 14, 79, 179,
194-196, 212, 214, 241, 277,
288, 407, 441, 463

Maritain, Jacques, 168, 172, 178,
285, 288, 289, 389

Marx, Karl, 27, 38, 92-141, 147,
156, 188, 231, 311, 312, 316,
393, 446

Mascall, E. L., 316, 353, 360

Mehta, Ved, 405, 428, 432

Merleau-Ponty, 195, 198, 276-
307

Mihajlov, Mihajlo, Dr., 137

Mill, John Stuart, 154, 155, 158,
159, 177

Mirabilia Dei, 130, 343

Molnar, Thomas, 242

Montgomery, John Warwick, 441-
443

Moscow, 5

Moscow Summer, 137

Mystical Body of Christ, 8

The Myth of Sisyphus, 199-201

Nausea, 217

Nechayev, Sergei, 114, 115

New Christianity, 144

The New Essence of Christianity,
414

The New Testament and Mythol-
ogy, 329, 363

Newman, Cardinal, 447

Niemeyer, Gerhart, 99

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42-91, 147,
156, 187, 263, 269, 273, 278,

489

311, 316, 401, 404-406, 408,
410

Nobel Prize, 199

Norton-Taylor Duncan, 361

Ogletree, Thomas, W., 419, 443

Pascal, Blaise, 15

The Plague, 209

Plato, 34, 67, 68

Pope Leo XIII, 118, 121

Pope Paul VI, 4

Pope Pius XI, 119, 121

Pope Pius XII, 290

The Present and Future of Re-
ligion, 464

Ravines, Eudocio, 112, 114

The Rebel, 199, 207

Red Atheism, 5

The Reprieve, 217

Resistance; Rebellion; Death, 199

Rheinische Zeitung, 95

Ritschl, Professor, 46

Robinson, John A. T., 317, 319,
363-372

Rousseau, Henri, 62, 311

Russell, Bertrand, 466

Saint-Simon, 144, 145

Saisset, Emile, 37

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 194, 195, 197,
203, 216-246, 277, 280, 281,
303

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 62, 64, 65

The Secular City, 372

Secular Meaning of the Gospel,
429, 434

The Shaking of the Foundations,
363

Spenlé, Jean-Eduard, 30

Stalin, Joseph, 110, 115, 116,
137, 472,

490

Stewart-Smith, D. G., 136
Stirner, Max, 32

The Stranger, 199, 203-205, 208
Strauss, Friedrich David, 28

Tarsis, Valeriy, 455

Theos, 2

Thus Spake Zarathustra, 55, 60,
78

Tillich, Paul, 317, 323, 348-364

Tonsor, Stephan, 79

Tower of Babel, 19

Transcendent, 14, 26, 40

Trotsky, Leon, 92

Ultimate Concern, 354

INDEX

Vahanian, Gabriel, 385, 388-398
Van Buren, Paul, 388, 398
Versényi, Laszlo, 268

Vivre pour auturé, 173

Wait Without Idols, 389, 394
Wilkelmsen, Frederich, 377, 379,
381
The Will to Power, 59, 65, 66, 69
The Words, 216, 219, 235, 245
The World as Will and Idea, 64
Worker's Paradise Lost, 5, 114
Wurmbrand, Richard, 116

The Yenan Way, 112